Shippit triples value as Tiger Global and Tidal lead $65m investment

“We have been pretty capital efficient, and we were profitable for the whole of 2020 and that led Tiger and Tidal to see our ability to capitalise on the opportunities we have and see other opportunities in new growth vectors,” he said.

“We want to empower 200 million deliveries without waste ... and we want to be able to pour people and resources into areas that will help us grow, like our South-East Asia expansion and our acquisition of Premonition.”

The round is being positioned as an extension to its $30 million Series B round announced in December 2020, but the company still had money left over from that raise.

The company, founded in 2014 by Mr On and Rob Hango-Zada, has created a multi-carrier logistics platform using artificial intelligence to connect retailers with the best delivery options. It enables them to offer same-day delivery and track last-mile logistics.

It enabled 40 million deliveries in calendar 2021, up 21.3 per cent on 2020. Its customers include Target, Sephora, Campos Coffee and Tree of Life. It now has 200 customers in Singapore and Malaysia, making up 10 per cent of its total volume.

In March, it made its first acquisition, buying fellow logistics tech company Premonition for $20.5 million.

It also announced a partnership with Uber in March, making same-hour delivery available to thousands of retailers.

Reflecting on its first eight years in business, Mr Hango-Zada said the company was completely different to the one they originally set out to build.

“We were pretty ignorant going into this business in the early days. We didn’t know about the structural inefficiencies in the industry that need to be solved,” he said.

“Our founding concept was a three-hour delivery business operating between 7am and 10pm, which you could re-route to your office or home. [But] it didn’t scale, and we found ourselves in a position to build a multi-carrier platform.”

The pivot was thanks to a board meeting in December 2015.

“We’d been ... high-fiving because we’d done 3000 deliveries that month... but the board said ‘if this is how much money you make off 3000 deliveries, pack it up’. We’d been onboarding our first enterprise customer, and they wanted one platform that could do everything,” Mr Hango-Zada said.

“In early 2016 we pulled the rabbit out of the hat and introduced our SaaS model, and we haven’t looked back since.”

Mike Ford, co-founder and chairman of listed online hotel booking platform Siteminder, also bought into Shippit’s latest round.

Mr Jasper said his secondary fund, SecondQuarter Ventures, had bought some of the positions of early Shippit investors. He said the fund had been engaging with Shippit for almost a year.

“We like it when you have founders who really understand the problem they’re solving,” he said.

“But more than anything we look for businesses with a great track record of growth, strong inventors, and the whole SecondQuarter model is that we want to invest alongside leading VCs.”