Shippo Lands $45M To Make Shipping Easier For E-Commerce Businesses

Shipping platform Shippo has raised $45 million in a new round of funding, more than doubling the startup’s valuation to $495 million.

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The Shippo platform helps e-commerce companies manage their shipping operations more seamlessly. The idea for Shippo came about after the co-founders, who previously founded an e-commerce business, found there was no easy solution for shipping like there was for processing payments.

“We just realized that shipping is really hard and it shouldn’t be this hard, especially because we were using other technology products like Stripe and Shopify that made it easy to set up our store and do payments,” CEO Laura Behrens Wu said in an interview with Crunchbase News.

Shippo pulls an e-commerce business’ orders into its dashboard and displays the different shipping options and rates. Customers can sort through the options by cost and speed to figure out which shipping option is best. Shippo also provides the correct shipping label, packing slip for a warehouse, and sends tracking information and return labels to customers.

The company works with more than 50 carriers around the world, including the United States Postal Service, UPS and FedEx.

Shippo’s customers are typically small to medium-sized businesses and direct-to-consumer businesses. While existing shipping companies are good at the shipping part, Behrens Wu said, they aren’t software companies so they typically don’t have an efficient tech platform built out.

“What (our customers) have in common is they all need to ship but they’re not shipping experts so they’re looking for a third-party software to help them figure that out,” she said.

Last year, Shippo more than doubled its customer base, according to the company, and more than 70,000 brands use the business. Customers include Hims, Aesop and Touch of Modern.

The new funding will be used to continue Shippo’s growth and invest in building products for the platform, Behrens Wu said. The company, which is most active in the U.S., Germany, Canada and Australia, is also looking to expand internationally.

Shippo is among a relatively small group of companies in the usage-based SaaS space, an area that Jeremy Levine, a partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, expects to grow. Shippo also has an opportunity to add on larger shippers, Levine said in an interview.

Investors in the company include Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson, Stripe CEO Patrick Collison, PagerDuty CEO Jennifer Tejada, and Pioneer and Cue founder Daniel Gross, as well as firms including Bessemer Venture Partners, Union Square Ventures, Uncork Capital, Version One Ventures and D1 Capital Partners.