Announcing our Series A Funding
Today marks a big milestone at Shippo. We are very excited to announce our Series A funding led by Union Square Ventures and welcome Albert Wenger to our board.
Shippo powers shipping for businesses. With one simple, scalable API, we’ve built a solution to help developers connect to a network of shipping providers and print shipping labels in minutes. We help businesses compare shipping rates, print discounted shipping labels, and track shipments, with a goal of making shipping easy and affordable for everyone.
I’d like to use this announcement as an opportunity to look back on our journey so far, and share what the Series A means for Shippo going forward.
On February 11th, 2014, we printed our first shipping label. Since then, Shippo has grown to power over 10,000 businesses everyday, sending millions of packages to and from 196 countries around the world.
In the last 2 years, we’ve been continuously improving our API and growing the team. Here are some highlights:
- Our RESTful API connects directly to shipping providers across North America, Europe, and Australia. Developers are able to integrate with all of our supported carriers to print live shipping labels within minutes, and set up their entire shipping operations within hours.
- Small businesses using Shippo can find us on 7 different e-commerce platforms, or manually upload orders to our dashboard. Anyone can benefit from our discounted rates, and compare shipping rates with just a few clicks.
- We’re proud to maintain and exceed a 99.9% uptime by building a system to calculate and provide shipping rates even when other APIs go offline.
- Our team has grown to 28, with the addition of new executive team members who have years of experience in the e-commerce and shipping industry. And we’re continuing to hire.
What Series A Financing Means to Shippo
Raising this round is really about growing the company. We will be using the money to hire the right team of people with the skills and experience to move us through a period of rapid growth and scaling. Our goal is to not only to hire for expertise, but to also grow a mature, diverse, and healthy team who can learn from each other and work together.
We’ve already started to bring in e-commerce experts, most recently welcoming Sin-Mei Tsai as our VP of Engineering. Prior to Shippo, she was the CTO and VP of Engineering at Joyus. We also had Mikhail Ledvich join us as the Head of Marketing, coming from Monsoon Commerce.
Our next foray will be in data, which is one of the reasons why we are so excited to have Albert and the Union Square Ventures team on board. Albert and his colleagues are experts in working with companies who utilize “the network effect to build infrastructure for the new economy” and we look forward to learning from their experience in the space.
With millions of packages sent through Shippo every month, we’re able to predict trends and find savings for customers. We want to be able to recommend optimal package dimensions for each business, and suggest carriers and services that works best for their customer set. Our goal is to help everyone ship smarter. We’re already doing this manually, and we are building out a team to automate and scale our data operations.
So what’s next?
When people think of a better payment API they think of Stripe, when people think of communication technology, it’s Twilio. We want Shippo to be that household name for shipping.
To get there, we’ll continue to focus on our mission to simplify shipping for businesses. From small merchants, venture-backed companies, all the way to supply chain management systems and warehouses, we want to power shipping for businesses of all sizes and types. And we’re looking to grow a team to help us do that.
We’re currently hiring across all departments and forming new ones. At Shippo we work on hard problems in the real world. We’re interested in both business folks and developers who are motivated and excited to take ownership of their work. We have customers waiting for you to help them with mission-critical operations.
Please reach out if you’re interested in joining the team or if you’re looking for help with shipping.
Thank you’s
I want to make sure to give a big shoutout and thank you to our customers, the team, early investors, and friends. All of you believed in what we were doing from the beginning, and have supported us in your own way. Your direct and unfiltered feedback has helped us grow into what we are today. I am so thankful to continue leaning on that support.
Shippo is a multi-carrier API and web app that helps retailers, marketplaces and platforms connect to a global network of carriers. Businesses use Shippo to get real-time rates, print labels, automate international paperwork, track packages and facilitate returns. Shippo provides the tools to help businesses succeed through shipping.
Looking for a multi-carrier shipping platform?
With Shippo, shipping is as easy as it should be.
- Pre-built integrations into shopping carts like Magento, Shopify, Amazon, eBay, and others.
- Support for dozens of carriers including USPS, FedEx, UPS, and DHL.
- Speed through your shipping with automations, bulk label purchase, and more.
- Shipping Insurance: Insure your packages at an affordable cost.
- Shipping API for building your own shipping solution.
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