ShipBob, a shipping startup, is close to finalizing a $1.5 million round of financing.
The Y Combinator-incubated package delivery company ships for businesses, mainly e-commerce ventures. The company launched last August. Today, it ships 8,000 packages per month for more than 100 clients. The company, which claims to be running a profit margin of 50 percent per package, began operations in Chicago and recently expanded to New York.
ShipBob is one of a slew of startups seeking to seize on the shipping component of e-commerce. While many, including ShipBob, do not handle the actual shipping, just the packaging and forwarding, the startups represent a new crop of ventures that could upset the established shipping business.
Here’s how ShipBob describes what it does:
By integrating with platforms like Shopify, eBay, Etsy and Kickstarter, ShipBob literally makes fulfillment as easy as a click of a button. Orders come in, ShipBob is notified, the items are picked up, packed and shipped. The entire process is three times as fast and a third the cost of in-house fulfillment teams for their target merchants, and they can scale with them as they grow.
ShipBob’s current round of funding is being run through WeFunder, an online venture capital service.