- Shipium sells software to help retailers make shipping decisions to compete on speed.
- The company says it expects to have processed 100 million shipments by the end of the year.
- Check out its 10-slide pitch deck below.
Less than a year after announcing an $8 million second seed round, Shipium has a fresh injection of funding.
The Seattle e-commerce logistics startup, founded by two alumni of Amazon’s massive supply-chain machine, prepped a slick pitch deck for the $27.5 million Series A round led by Insight Partners, announced on Thursday. But Shipium’s cofounder Jason Murray told Insider that investor enthusiasm for e-commerce logistics is such that he never had to present it.
Shipium’s software aims to create the best path for a package based on the desired speed and shipping cost. It decides where the inventory should come from; which carrier, like UPS or FedEx, should be employed; and how fast it should ship to meet customer expectations and maximize profits.
The software is complex, but the pitch is simple — Murray and his cofounder, Mac Brown, did similar work at Amazon, which has turned this capability into the agenda-setting Prime shipping program.
“We spent two full months building the pitch, refining it from feedback, and practicing ad nauseam,” Murray told Insider. “We trimmed and simplified and changed direction so much. It was one of the hardest sprints of my life, and I never felt like it was quite right.”
When the team started outreach to existing and new investors in March, they were fast-tracked into deeper conversations. “Almost everyone we talked to got it immediately,” he said.
He credited the founders’ expertise and the startup’s business model. Though software is standard fare for VCs, investors have been branching out by funding logistics startups that are actually handling packages and competing