附近上门

Shipping platform has raised $45 million in a new round of funding, more than doubling the startup鈥檚 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.

鈥淲e just realized that shipping is really hard and it shouldn’t be this hard, especially because we were using other technology products like and that made it easy to set up our store and do payments,鈥� CEO said in an interview with 附近上门 News.

Shippo pulls an e-commerce business鈥� 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 , and .

Shippo鈥檚 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鈥檛 software companies so they typically don鈥檛 have an efficient tech platform built out.

鈥淲hat (our customers) have in common is they all need to ship but they鈥檙e not shipping experts so they鈥檙e looking for a third-party software to help them figure that out,鈥� 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 , and .听

The new funding will be used to continue Shippo鈥檚 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 , a partner at , expects to grow. Shippo also has an opportunity to add on larger shippers, Levine said in an interview.

Investors in the company include CEO , CEO , CEO , and Pioneer and founder , as well as firms including Bessemer Venture Partners, , , and

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias