After having self-financed Shippingbo since its launch, the historical partners of the first SaaS technology for omnichannel e-commerce logistics have announced the finalization of their first round of financing, with two regional funds specializing in financing innovative companies: IRDI and Crédit Agricole GSO. To talk about this milestone in the company’s history, Marc Héricher, CEO, and Romain Parent, Chief Strategy Officer – Managing Director at Shippingbo, have reserved an interview for us.

Why did you decide to raise funds now, when the market is telling us that it’s getting more and more complicated to do so?

Romain: For our part, we didn’t find it particularly difficult to raise funds. One of the reasons for this was that we didn’t do a roadshow as such. As our head office is in Toulouse, we were already in contact with the teams atIRDI, who had been following our project almost from the start. They were aware of our ability to execute, and for our part, we shared their pragmatic investment philosophy and values (notably their commitment to CSR). Finally, they were quick to grasp how important it was for us to retain strong control over our company. All these points meant that we quickly reached an agreement for them to lead the round. Given our ambitions, we called on a second fund to complete the round; GSOand we’re more than delighted!

Marc: On the “why now” question, I’d say we’re a team of associates with complementary expertise in e-commerce, logistics, marketing, technology, entrepreneurship and business scaling. For many of us, this is not our first company. We developed our product in Lean Startup mode, because we wanted to create a product that met real user expectations, and on a profitable business model. We didn’t want to raise money for the sake of raising money, and so far working on our own capital hasn’t slowed us down, but on the contrary has enabled us to create a sound basis for success on a larger scale.

The figures bear this out: in the last 12 months, over 2 billion euros worth of goods were shipped using our technology. And this figure has been rising steadily since Shippingbo was founded. In 5 years, we’re proud to say that we’ve succeeded in meeting the challenge we set ourselves: to become one of France’s leading e-commerce logistics technology providers.

Romain: Now that our model has been fully validated, we want to accelerate our development and become one of Europe’s leaders over the next 5 years. We’re betting on recruitment of new talent to conquer new markets, while continuing to provide the best possible support to our growing number of existing customers. And so we are, We will be doubling our workforce by the end of the year, with the recruitment of 40 new employees.This obviously requires more rapid financial investment, which is why we have now opened up our capital, without entering into a logic of uncontrolled cash burn, which is not part of our values, nor those of our financial partners, and which seems to be going out of fashion on the market.

What does Shippingbo actually offer?

Marc: Shippingbo is a highly operational way of connecting all storage locations and distribution channels to :

With the aim of offering the end customer an optimal post-purchase experience.

Our technology is scalable and capable of supporting the creators of e-commerce businesses who have to process a dozen orders a day, as well as those who are just starting up. groups. At present, we support companies with a wide range of profiles: pure-play e-tailers, retailers, wholesalers, retailers, distributors, manufacturers, e-tailers, logisticians, carriers, commission agents, marketplaces, private sales, agencies, publishers, historic brands d2c, DNVB…We also equip preparation and dispatch sites of all sizes: warehouses, urban hubs, stores…

Romain: We don’t claim to develop a single technology to manage our customers’ entire Information Systems, but rather advocate a best-of-breed approach, which enables us to forge partnerships with all types of players with complementary value propositions: CMS, ERP, Flow Manager, Repricer, CRM, BI, but also other WMS and TMS publishers.

Who is your product aimed at? What is your vision?

Romain: Shippingbo is much more than just software! Our vision is to provide a unique infrastructure for the ecosystem that fosters business synergies between all players in the connected commerce supply chain. To achieve this, we act as a technological facilitator, offering over 200 plug & play connectors to numerous APIs. Our positioning and business model based on a pay-per-use technology cost aligns our interests with those of our customers and partners, as we are completely agnostic .

We are convinced that this technology-enabled optimization of data flows between players is the only way to truly optimize the physical flow of goods and the associated environmental impact. We’re very proud to have already enabled some of our partners to reduce the number of trucks needed to carry out their rounds through multi-carrier collection, and also by avoiding unnecessary inter-warehouse movements of goods, but we want to invest even more R&D effort in these areas.

Marc: Today, commerce has become completely omnichannel. Indeed, when you want to do e-commerce :

  • We no longer choose to sell online OR in-store,
  • We no longer choose to sell on our website OR via marketplaces or private sales,
  • We no longer choose between selling through a distributor network OR directly.
  • There’s no longer a choice between insourcing OR outsourcing logistics
  • At last, there’s no longer any choice between home delivery / collection point delivery / standard delivery OR express delivery…

We often do all these things at the same time.
This omnichannel nature, coupled with consumers’ ever-increasing demands, means that logistics are becoming exponentially more complex. Shippingbo offers a technology designed to meet the logistics challenges of omnichannel e-commerce. We offer a modular SaaS software suite comprising the most powerful e-commerce OMS on the market, as well as a WMS and TMS designed natively for omnichannel e-commerce.