On-demand shipping startup Shyp only officially launched in San Francisco just a few months ago, but it’s already looking to expand to new markets. First, though, the company raised $10 million in new capital, led by Shervin Pishevar and Scott Stanford’s SherpaVentures.
The funding follows $2.3 million in seed funding that Shyp had raised from Homebrew Ventures and a large number of angel investors. And with the latest funding, SherpaVenture’s Stanford will join the company’s board.
With an iPhone app, Shyp enables users to simplify the process of shipping items basically anywhere in the world. The company has aligned itself with all the major shipping carriers, and has done a lot of work to create efficiencies around shipping and lower the cost it takes to get goods from one place to another.
Users simply take a photo of the item they wish to ship, and the company does the rest — it picks the item up, packs it, and determines the lowest-cost, highest-quality carrier to send it with. By doing so, it can not just make the process of shipping more convenient, but actually save consumers money, since most don’t know the best way to ship their items.
The idea has resonated in its home market of San Francisco, where Shyp officially launched just a few months ago. It’s now done more than 15,000 shipments and grown its user base 20-fold in just a few short months.
Now that Shyp has gotten its feet under it, the company is ready to start thinking about expansion. And that’s partly why it chose SherpaVentures as its lead Series A investor, according to co-founder and CEO Kevin Gibbon.
Founded by Pishevar and Stanford, SherpaVentures has a good amount of experience in peer-to-peer marketplaces and on-demand services. The two were behind their previous employer’s investments in Uber, and Pishevar had also funded a number of other startups, including TaskRabbit and Getaround, among others. More recently, they led the $28 million Series B investment in Munchery, which is planning a launch in Seattle.
Having an investor well-versed in the nuances of market-to-market expansion will be crucial for Shyp, as it prepares to enter its second market of New York City. The company already has warehouse space there and is looking to hire drivers to pick up goods and packers for its warehouse to get things up and running.
The company is planning a New York launch in the fall, and has a landing page up so that users can sign up to be alerted when the service is live.
In addition to market expansion, Shyp is also hoping to use the funding to invest in its product, bringing it to new platforms and improving the experience for different types of users.
One of the surprising things about early adoption has been the different types of users that have signed up, according to Gibbon. It was expecting to get users signed up who were casual shippers, but is seeing use from power sellers on different sales platforms and even companies that are looking to fulfill Kickstarter sales.
Filling out shipping info for multiple destinations on a mobile interface was not what the product was intended for, but Shyp will probably look to make that easier over time. It’s also looking to get the app on more devices, and that means developing for Android and possibly other operating systems.
Comment