ShipBob Raises $4M to Help Small Businesses Ship their Stuff
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ShipBob
Deal: $4 million Series A
Investors: The round was led by Hyde Park Venture Partners, with participation from Hyde Park Angels, FJ Labs, Recruit Strategic Partners, FundersClub, Startcaps Ventures, NFQ Capital, Network Ventures, Bluestein and Associates, Service Provider Capital, Russell Long, SV Angel and Y Combinator.
What they do: Chicago startup ShipBob helps small businesses ship their goods more efficiently. After a merchant makes a sale, they schedule a pickup and ShipBob professionally packs the item and compares shipping prices at USPS, UPS, FedEx & DHL for the lowest rate. ShipBob integrates with popular online e-commerce platforms like eBay, Shopify, and Amazon, and also offers warehousing, which allows customers to store inventory with ShipBob. ShipBob can package and ship out orders as they are placed.
ShipBob says it saves SMBs time and money by taking care of the shipping logistics.
“My co-founder and I were running an ecommerce store ourselves and every time we got an order, we had to go to the Post Office and stand in line to mail our items,” ShipBob co-founder Dhruv Saxena said in a statement. “We realized shipping was broken for SMBs and there were no good solutions out there. That’s when we decided to start ShipBob. We’ve grown rapidly and this round of funding will enable us to scale up to meet demand, to take the pain out of shipping for more small businesses and help them scale as they grow.”
Other details: ShipBob participated in Y Combinator in 2014 and says it has experienced double-digit growth month-over-month, and is operationally profitable in Chicago and New York, the two markers where it is active. The startup says it plans to expand into a third city later this summer. ShipBob raised a $1 million Seed Round last year.