Wholesale Shopping App Boxed Raises $6.5M From Greycroft, First Round, And Signia

Last summer, mobile commerce startup Boxed launched its app to enable customers to buy wholesale goods and have them shipped to their doors. With ultra-fast growth over the last several months, the company has raised a $6.5 million round of funding designed to help accelerate things even further.

The idea behind Boxed is pretty simple — give users access to the same types of wholesale deals they would find at warehouse retailers like Sam’s Club or Costco, but without having to worry about annual membership fees or actually driving back and forth from one of those places to lug their bulk goods around.

Boxed provides an alternative to big box brick-and-mortar retailers with the ability to shop name-brand goods through their mobile phone or tablet. It also offers expedited, 2-day shipping of wholesale goods to anywhere in the contiguous 48 states in the U.S.

The company is able to offer a wide variety of goods without having to carry everything. Its two main warehouses — one on the east coast and one on the west coast — each carry about 800 items each, which is a far cry from the inventory available in a Costco.

However, Boxed has found that it’s not only able to cover most customers’ needs, but that it’s able to suggest goods that users might not have necessarily been looking for when they logged on. According to CEO Chieh Huang, about 80 percent of items added to user’s carts don’t come from search, but come from the app’s discovery mechanism.

Without a lot of marketing, it’s seeing about 100 percent month-over-month growth, which is why the team figured it was time to step on the gas with new funding.

With that in mind, Boxed raised $6.5 million in Series A funding that included returning investor Greycroft Partners, as well as new investors First Round Capital and Signia Venture Partners. ENIAC Ventures, Social Starts, Box Group, former Facebook COO Owen Van Natta and former Zynga COO David Ko also participated in the round.