The third party logistics provider now expects to open 10 more facilities across North America and Europe
Third party logistics provider (3PL) ShipBob today secured a $200 million venture capital (VC) round, positioning its cloud-based e-commerce platform for fast growth and making it the latest logistics startup to reach the $1 billion unicorn valuation.
The firm said its series E funding round was led by Bain Capital Ventures, with additional participation from prior investors including SoftBank, Menlo Ventures, Hyde Park Venture Partners, Hyde Park Angels, and Silicon Valley Bank.
Earlier, the company expanded its fulfilment centre network from 10 to 24 facilities following a $68 million funding round in 2020. The expansion included its first facilities in both the U.K. and Australia.
ShipBob now expects to open 10 more facilities across North America and Europe in 2021.
While the firm’s new funding was large, it was at least the third venture backing of comparable size for logistics startups this month alone, following rounds of $240 million for the German digitized freight forwarding provider Forto GmbH and $190 million for fleet management technology provider KeepTruckin.
ShipBob says it enables small and mid-sized e-commerce merchants to provide fast and affordable shipping to their customers without having to handle fulfilment themselves. Those merchants can also add services like returns management, inventory management, and financing tools.
The firm provides those services through integrations with e-commerce platforms and marketplaces including Amazon, Walmart, Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, Wix, Square, and Squarespace. ShipBob uses a purpose-built fulfilment technology stack including its own warehouse management system (WMS) to handle all that business.
By deploying that WMS to all of its fulfilment centres, the company says it has shortened the time required to stand up new facilities to weeks instead of quarters.
All of the facilities in the ShipBob network look the same, operate the same way and leverage the same world-class, cloud-based technology, which makes our merchant experience very consistent even as inventory is distributed across the globe, Divey Gulati, ShipBob’s president and co-founder, said in a release.
Gulati said: With the additional investment from Bain Capital Ventures and our Series E, we can continue to make strategic, long-term investments in our product and technology to help make e-commerce businesses more successful.