Bigblue, the order fulfilment platform that allows brands to sell more with effortless e-commerce logistics, announced it has closed $15M in Series A funding. The round was led by Runa Capital with LPV as the secondary lead investor and additional participation from existing investor Samaipata. Bigblue provides customers with prime-like deliveries, branded tracking emails and a dedicated returns portal to enable a superior experience.
E-commerce giants like Amazon and Zalando have invested billions in software and infrastructure to provide the best experience for their customers, but these solutions are only optimised for their own businesses. To sell effectively, e-commerce brands search for the solutions tailored specifically to their needs — Bigblue offers an all-in-one platform optimised for each independent brand and helps companies selling online deliver the best and most unique customer experience.
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Bigblue provides shipping automation, transport optimisation, branded post-purchase communications, and more. The company operates an intelligent European warehouse and carrier network that uses AI to pick the best shipping method for each shipment and ensure fast and green fulfilment. With Bigblue, brands can even add a personalised insert to their packages, customise their packaging, or tell their story in shipping notifications.
Bigblue already has more than 300 client brands, and in 2022 will ship 4 million parcels from 3 different countries. All Bigblue services are included in a single cost, and the company has native integrations with Shopify and other leading e-commerce platforms — they allow sellers to create an account in minutes, send inventory into the Bigblue network, and start selling with fast, branded fulfilment in as little as one week.
“Powering independent brands in France since 2018, Bigblue does not simply offer a fulfilment solution that matches Amazon standards – we aim to make it easy for brands to grow online”, says Tim Dumain, co-founder at Bigblue. “With this new round we will support scaling service offerings for Bigblue’s growing base of online merchants, fuel hiring efforts, and continue to position the company as the leader in the D2C fulfilment space.”
“Runa Capital sees Bigblue as a crucial part of the online merchants’ tech stack and believes that the e-commerce market will continue to grow at an impressive pace in the future. We’re confident the team has everything to become the European leader in e-commerce fulfilment,” says Dmitry Chikhachev, General Partner at Runa Capital. “We appreciate the potential of the platform, and are happy to support the team on its way to success”.
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With its new program Fast Tags, Bigblue helps brands to reduce their marketing costs: it automatically pushes eligible buyers a 98% accurate 1-day delivery time along their purchase journey. Early adopters have seen a significant increase of 20-40% in conversion, saving them substantial amounts in acquisition costs.
Since its inception, Bigblue has been committed to making logistics greener, helping brands move towards sustainability. This becomes relevant since 85% of people globally prefer to buy from sustainable brands, and logistics has a key role to play in improving the environmental impact of e-commerce. Bigblue works hand-in-hand with its merchants to match with their expectations in sustainability: its proprietary technology optimises transport routes and truck filling, reducing carbon emissions by 25%. In addition, parcels are delivered via cargo bikes and electric vehicles in major cities, all packaging is plastic-free and recyclable, and the company’s warehouses are Ecocert certified.
With the 15 million funding, Bigblue plans to hire 100 new people over the next 12 months in sales, marketing and operations, and triple its engineering staff. The start-up opened its first international office in Madrid in January and will expand to the rest of Europe over the next 12 months. This European expansion comes with ambitious goals: the team plans to expand low-carbon 1-day delivery to all of Western Europe, help national brands to become European, by supporting them in their internationalisation, continue to improve the post-shopping experience and extend its Fast Tag Program to help more brands get rid of overwhelming acquisition costs.
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