Logistics startup byrd secured a $5.8 million Series A round of funding to advance its global fulfillment platform.
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The company was founded in 2016 in Vienna by Alexander Leichter, Christoph Krofitsch, Petra Dobrocka and Sebastian Mach, and uses cloud-based software to connect more than 200 online retailers with fulfillment centers and shipping service across multiple countries.
Rider Global led the round with participation from VentureFriends and FJ Labs, as well as current investors including, Speedinvest, Reflex Capital, Hermann Hauser and KK Incube, according to the company. To date, byrd has raised a total of $10.4 million, according to the company.
”We are excited about the market that byrd is active in,” said Timur Boridko, managing partner at Rider Global, in a written statement. “The increasing e-commerce share of direct-to-consumer brands in the US is a trend we see emerging rapidly in Europe as well. To successfully compete with established industry leaders, retailers need flexible logistics solutions like byrd.”
Currently, the company is able to ship 10,000 orders per day from more than 10 different warehouses with storage capacities of more than 500,000 square meters. Its core markets are in Germany and Austria with additional fulfillment locations in the U.K.
Plans for the new funding include expanding the virtual warehouse network to eight markets—adding the Netherlands and France later this year—so retailers will be able to ship worldwide from those new locations by the end of the year, Dobrocka, byrd’s chief commercial officer, said in an interview with Crunchbase News.
“We are expanding within Europe and then globally in another three locations,” she added. “We are doing market research to try and figure out which to go into next.”
One of the market options was the U.S., but given the current pandemic environment, byrd is considering options closer to home in Europe, such as one of the Nordic countries, Spain or Poland, Dobrocka said.
The funding is also going to be used on new hires and product development. The company has grown from 25 to 60 employees in the last 10 months and recently made some key hires, including a new chief product officer and a head of data engineering and analytics. In addition, byrd will unveil new features later this year, such as functionality for business-to-business shipments to retailers and the availability of data analytics on the retailer side.
Next up, the byrd team is preparing for its international expansion, as well as ensuring everything is ready to sell to its new Dutch and French customers.
“In Europe, it is scattered with languages, so we have to have the right team to sell to Dutch and French companies,” Dobrocka said. “We will also add the new features to the product that will expand our options to who we can sell, including large companies that are growing to direct-to-consumer segments.”
Feature photo courtesy of byrd
Blogroll illustration: Li-Anne Dias
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