Jason Traff, President and Co-Founder of Shipwell, photo courtesy of Shipwell
Shipwell, which makes an online platform for any business to ship and track freight easily, announced Thursday that it has raised $35 million.
Georgian Partners, based in Toronto, Canada, led the Series B round. Other investors include Fifth Wall, Global Founders Capital, Box Group and Aspect Ventures.
To date, Shipwell, founded in 2016, has raised $47 million in funding.
With the latest funds, Shipwell plans to open an additional office in Austin in the Domain area, said Jason Traff, President and Co-founder of Shipwell. It has a 7,800 square foot office with 88 employees in the Bank of America building downtown, said Traff said. Shipwell plans to keep that office. It also plans to open an office in Chicago in January, he said.
Right now, Shipwell has 95 employees, but the company plans to hire another 200 employees, Traff said.
Both Traff and Gregory Price, co-founders of Shipwell have experience in the shipping industry. They also share ties as students at MIT. Traff dropped out of MIT’s Sloan School of Management to join Y-Combinator and launch Leaky, an insurance technology startup that was later acquired by an insurance company.
Before that, Traff had an oil painting reproduction business based in Shenzhen, China that shipped to four continents. Price worked at McKinsey with Fortune 100 companies on supply chain consulting. They saw a lot of inefficiency and waste in time and money companies spent in the shipping industry.
Together, they saw how some of the best companies in the world like Amazon and Wal-Mart invested in supply chain logistics to turn shipping into a competitive advantage.
They created Shipwell to give customers that same kind of supply chain shipping advantage by using its online platform. The company’s freight shipping platform provides quotes, and tracking information on every shipment.
Its customer saves an average of 15 percent on shipping costs, Traff said.
“Everything everywhere should ship as easy as Amazon,” Traff said.
Shipwell has been focused on the domestic US market but has also expanded into Canada. Shipwell is also now handling parcel shipping along with its traditional freight shipping modes. It is now FedEx compatible, allowing its customers to manage their parcel and freight shipping on one centralized platform.
“For a lot of companies, we are able to give them visibility to where their shipments are at any moment,” Traff said.
Since October 2018, Shipwell grew shipments on the platform by 600 percent from over 4,000 monthly customers that generate over 100 million rows of location data every day.
“In the coming months and years ahead, our focus on delivering a platform with layers of sophistication built on machine learning and AI will take our customers to the future of supply chain execution,” Traff said.