ShipBob brings in $68 million in new round of investment

Chicago-based ShipBob, an e-commerce technology and fulfillment services provider focused on bringing fast shipping to e-commerce shippers, said today it has brought on $68 million in primary funding, which was spearheaded by SoftBank Vision Fund. This round of funding brings the company’s total funding to $130.5 million.

ShipBob officials said that this funding will help to augment the company’s efforts to provide what it called world-class fulfillment to more customers, drive growth, expand its software platform, and scale its global fulfillment network.

In an interview, Dhruv Saxena, ShipBob Co-Founder and CEO, told LM that the biggest benefit of this funding for its e-commerce merchant customers is the growing network of ShipBob fulfillment centers, so merchants can distribute their inventory across regions and countries to be closer to their end customers.

“As merchants distribute inventory closer to their customers, it helps reduce their fulfillment costs and reduce their transit time,” said Saxena. “This helps them accomplish an Amazon Prime-like experience for their ecommerce orders (for example, ShipBob customer TB12 has reduced shipping costs by 25% by switching to ShipBob from a regional 3PL and ShipBob customer Ample Foods brought 13% cost savings to their bottom line by distributing inventory across ShipBob fulfillment centers). We have now 10 locations in our network and two of those are international (Canada and Ireland). We are looking to add more in Q4 and add another 10 in 2021.”

When asked what this funding provides for ShipBob that may have previously been missing, Saxena said that this investment will help provide new capabilities, including temperature-controlled warehousing and B2B pallet shipping to retail stores like Target, and Best Buy, among others.

“As our merchants are growing, we want them to be able to expand into new distribution channels,” explained Saxena. “Retail is an important channel for them and we hope to provide this capability in the future. Retail is undergoing a structural change, as more people are buying online than visiting physical stores. This capital allows us to take advantage of this generational shift towards ecommerce and provide a fulfillment infrastructure to support the e-commerce brands in their growth. This capital will allow us to make these long-term bets and position ourselves to successfully take advantage of the changing retail focus towards e-commerce.” 

ShipBob officials said that going back to the onset of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic in mid-March, the company has seen an increase in new customers turning to them, which has been evident as the company is growing at more than 100% annually and is cash-flow positive. And to meet this increase in demand, the company has rolled out six new fulfillment centers going back to April, which includes two international locations. What’s more, ShipBob said that it has brought on hundreds of new fulfillment associates in recent months and plans to hire hundreds more over the course of the run up to peak season.