SEPTEMBER 15, 2021 – E-commerce has undoubtedly seen a huge boost in growth in the last year and a half of COVID-19 living, with people turning to the web and apps to shop for essentials and not-so-essentials to keep their social distance and using delivery services to receive their goods rather than picking things up in person.
Today, a Dutch startup called Sendcloud that has built a service to help retailers with the latter of these — providing a cloud-based platform to easily organize and carry out shipping services by choosing from a wide range of carriers and other options — is announcing $177 million in funding, a major investment that speaks not just to Sendcloud’s recent growth, but of the demand in the market for what it does: provide an efficient and viable alternative to simply turning to Amazon for fulfillment, or going through the manual and costly process of sorting out shipping directly with the companies that provide it.
“We try to provide Amazon-level logistics to all the other merchants out there,” Rob van den Heuvel, Sendcloud’s CEO and co-founder, said in an interview. Pre-lock down, he said the company — which now has 23,000 customers — was seeing on average between 70% and 80% growth each year. During lockdown that went up to 120%, with 133% increases in parcel volumes. “And we have not seen volumes going down since,” he added.
Softbank Vision Fund 2 — a prolific investor in the many parts of the e-commerce ecosystem — is leading this Series C, with L Catterton and HPE Growth also participating. This by far the biggest investment Sendcloud has ever had: the Eindhoven, Netherlands-based startup has been around since 2012 and before now had raised just over $23 million ($23 million, 23,000 customers has a nice ring to it).
Van den Heuvel confirmed that the startup is not disclosing its valuation with this round, although a source very close to the deal tells us it’s around $750 million.
For the full article, please visit: https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/15/sendcloud-nabs-177m-led-by-softbank-to-double-down-on-saas-shipping-as-a-service/
