Eindhoven-based scale-up Sendcloud has raised 150 million euros in a so-called Series C funding round, which is aimed at the further growth of companies. The round was led by Softbank, a Japanese company.
Since 2012, Sendcloud has been taking the logistical process out of the hands of webshop owners. From checkout pages (checkout in a webshop) to arranging returns, all automated. Thanks to agreements with various transport carriers, consumers can now opt for different delivery times. Meanwhile, the platform serves about 23,000 customers across five countries.
This investment is mainly intended for achieving international growth, co-founder Sabi Tolou explains. At the beginning of last year, Sendcloud’s team numbered 150 people, and now they have 400 employees. “The expectation is that next year we will have about 650 colleagues worldwide. That’s where part of the money is going.”
Read more about Sendcloud here
Substantial growth
Even without this substantial investment, Sendcloud is experiencing strong growth. Turnover is doubling every year and the number of customers and dispatched packages is increasing. The corona pandemic only accelerated this growth. Tolou has an explanation for this. “E-commerce is changing rapidly. Suddenly Covid has created a whole new target group that orders goods via the Internet. Take my father as an example. He is almost 77 and had never done this before the pandemic. Older people require a different kind of service and are actually just starting to get to grips with it”
They want to make it as easy as possible for this group with the help of their tools. Tolou: “For instance, you don’t want consumers to keep calling the webshop to ask where their package is. This should be clear to consumers when they check out. We can also give consumers several options thanks to all the contracts we have with transporters. We would like to get rid of the awkward time slots where people have to stay at home between 9 and 3 pm.”
Optimising processes
The money from the investment will be used to optimise this process even more. “We are operating in several different countries. So we work with dynamic checkout pages that adapt to the country where the order is placed.”
Sendcloud will also open its first location in the US operating from the Netherlands next year. To do this, the founders are already integrating their tools into a number of webshops and are in talks with several US carriers. “The intention is to do this first from the Netherlands and if it goes well to open a physical location in America. At the same time, we will continue working on expanding in Europe. We see that there is still a lot of potential for growth in the UK, but in Spain and Italy as well. Germany also continues to be an important market for us that we want to expand into. We are going to do more marketing to make our services even more widely known.”