Shipium raises $27.5M Series A to provide e-Commerce retailers with tools required to compete with Amazon

In just three decades, Amazon has grown from a simple online bookseller to become an e-commerce giant. In 2021 alone, Amazon controls 40% of US e-commerce sales. The remaining 60% of sales are shared among 2.5 million US online retailers. With all the cards stacked against them, how can these retailers take on the retail behemoth?

Enter Shipium, a Seattle, Washington-based technology-driven supply chain and logistics startup company that is developing tools required to help e-commerce retailers to compete with Amazon. Shipium is seeking to solve “the Prime problem” and coordinates previously disconnected supply chain steps to help retailers offer fast, free, and on-time shipping.

On Thursday, Shipium announced it has raised $27.5M in Series A funding, making it the largest venture-backed Series A for a supply chain software startup in industry history. The round was led by New York-based private equity and venture capital firm Insight Partners.

Shipium will use the fresh funding to help retailers compete for customer growth and loyalty through a premium shipping experience. This round brings Shipium’s total funding to $38.7M since its inception in 2019, furthering its mission to help retailers compete for customer growth and loyalty through a premium shipping experience.

Founded in 2019 by Jason Murray and Mac Brown, the veteran team that built the technology powering Amazon Prime and Zulily’s supply chain, Shipium is a fulfillment management platform for e-commerce retail and provides the missing piece of technology that retailers need to meet changing consumer preferences while profitably scaling e-commerce operations.

For many years, last-mile delivery is the highest operating expense in e-commerce, typically around 12% of annual online sales. Meanwhile, fast and free shipping has been the key competitive growth driver for Amazon’s continual expansion. The rest of the industry struggles to reconcile how to reduce shipping costs while improving delivery speeds as a way to compete for customer growth and loyalty. The secret is coordination across fundamental stages of the supply chain, and that’s where Shipium helps. This Series A validates the idea that retailers are finally prioritizing the shipping experience just as much as the shopping experience, a key in the fight for market share.

“The pandemic has accelerated e-commerce growth to unprecedented heights, but major retailers continue to grow in both revenue and market share, largely due to its superior shipping experience,” said Brad Fiedler, Vice President of Insight Partners. “Jason, Mac, and the team’s background positions them as the foremost experts on how to help the rest of the retail industry compete for customer growth and loyalty. Insight Partners is excited to invest in Shipium to further help change the landscape of the e-commerce industry.”

The key ingredient to Shipium is data modeling. The platform takes decisions that are currently done via human-driven rules and spreadsheets, such as choosing the cheapest and fastest shipping method and automates them via machine learning and logic. Shipium is able to achieve desired outcomes around cheaper shipping costs and faster delivery speeds due to the platform’s coordination of previously fragmented and static decisions across the supply chain. The company will use the Series A funding to invest in engineering talent to expand platform capabilities that coordinate more parts of the supply chain, including network optimization and sophisticated order routing.

“Prime is the problem for everyone else because it focuses on what customers want, like faster and cheaper shipping options and a better delivery experience,” said Jason Murray, CEO and co-founder of Shipium. “Modern technology that unifies decisions throughout the supply chain in service of those last-mile goals is the only way to compete for customer growth and loyalty. This Series A funding indicates that the industry is understanding this. We’re excited to extend our offerings to retailers in order to give consumers what they want.”

Demand for the Shipium platform has been so strong that the company is on pace to break 100 million shipments processed by the end of 2022.