Take a look around you, chances are, pretty much everything you see has been shipped, often multiple times, in order to get there. Transport of goods is a massive industry. Global parcel shipping alone is worth $300 Billion. With the shift to e-commerce parcel shipping is growing rapidly and consumer expectations for fast and cheap delivery are being set by the very largest players, led by Amazon.
Creating a compelling shipping experience for customers is hard. The industry is fragmented with many different carriers and service options. Information about shipping is difficult to find and pricing is based on multiple criteria that are not always clear. Individual carrier APIs vary widely and are often difficult to implement.
Today, we are excited to announce that USV has led the Series A financing for Shippo, a single API for all shipping needs. Shippo connects businesses to multiple shipping carriers, letting them compare rates, generate labels, and track shipments. Shippo brings access to shipping infrastructure, discounted pricing, and detailed data to businesses of any size with just a few lines of code.
The complexities of the underlying infrastructure are abstracted away for developers, with Shippo taking care of the nuances and handling the edge cases. Just as Twilio made communications easy, Stripe and Dwolla payments, Shippo is doing the same for shipping. Businesses just getting started can even use Shippo without programming through a console and plugins for popular e-commerce platforms.
Shippo is building a network of customers and carriers to help optimize shipping for everyone that is already processing millions of packages to and from 230 countries. For customers Shippo provides access to more carriers and better rates and for carriers Shippo is a technology partner that allows easy programmatic integration by new and growing businesses.
We are thrilled to be backing Laura, Simon, and the Shippo team. You can read more about the financing and the company’s plans on Shippo’s blog. Also, Shippo is hiring.