Tidal Ventures has co-led with Tiger Global a $65 million Series B extension capital raising round for e-commerce fulfilment technology business Shippit.
The round was at a pre-money valuation of $300 million compared to $100 million for the Series B round at the end of 2020.
Venture secondaries fund manager SecondQuarter Ventures also took a stake in the transaction along with individual investor Mike Ford, co-founder of online accommodation booking platform Siteminder (ASX: SDR).
Tidal (then known as AddVenture) led Shippit’s seed funding round in 2017 and provided follow-on funding in Series A, Series A extension, Series B rounds since.
New York-based Tiger Global led Shippit’s $30 million Series B round in December 2020.
Tidal managing partner Grant McCarthy sees Shippit as much more than an e-commerce fulfilment business. He describes the company’s technology as a “logistics orchestration platform”. The key element of this is an algorithm that matches goods to be distributed with carriers on the basis: the right carrier, right delivery type and right price.
According to McCarthy, Shippit’s technology provides retailers with aggregated views of their deliveries and often directs volumes of deliveries to carriers they might not have used previously. Resulting improved performance builds up trusting relationships between Shippit and retailer customers.
Early on, Shippit also worked hard on developing a large community of reliable courier delivery businesses.
But McCarthy says the decision to back Shippit at seed-stage was based on recognising in founders William On and Rob Hango-Zada complementary skills, unbridled enthusiasm for their task and willingness to listen and learn from others.
Despite the pandemic forcing the business to reduce its employee headcount, Shippit first achieved profitability in 2020 and has continued to grow strongly since then. The company’s technology enabled 40 million deliveries in 2021, up 21.3% on the prior year.
Shippit has also expanded overseas to Singapore and Malaysia and in March made its first acquisition, logistics technology company Premonition for $20.5 million.
“We’re not getting courier’d away, though,” McCarthy said. “This is just the beginning. Shippit is continuing at pace on its mission to deliver 200 million deliveries.”
Image: Shippit founders Rob Hango-Zada and William On.