Shipping start-up raises P125 million in seed funding

MANILA, Philippines — Philippine-based shipping platform Shipmates  has raised $ 2.2 million or P125 million in a seed funding round, which it will use to scale up its platform.

In a statement, Shipmates said seed round was participated by Cathexis Ventures, Wavemaker Partners, Taurus Ventures, Capital X, Sketchnote Partners and other prominent investors.

The company plans to scale its platform to be the preferred shipping tool of all the merchants in the Philippines and improve the country’s shipping infrastructure by helping both online businesses and shipping companies.

Founded last year, the startup helps e-commerce businesses grow by making their shipping process easier and faster.

The platform allows online business owners to book standard or multiple orders, as well as compare rates between different couriers.

Citing data from Statista, Shipmates said the e-commerce market was the leading contributor to the internet economy in the Philippines in 2021, with an estimated gross merchandise value of $12 billion – a 132 percent increase from the previous year.

This is expected to hit $26 billion by 2025.

“When talking to online sellers, their biggest pain point has always been how manual shipping still is in our country,”Shipmates chief executive officer Josh Supan said.

“We built Shipmates to automate this, we built Shipmates for them and we are very glad to be joined by our amazing investors in making this vision a reality,”Supan added.

He explained that instead of shippers booking couriers manually on their phones or physically dropping off packages, their orders feed straight into Shipmates, and they can pick a courier for shipping from there.

Supan and Shipmates chief technology officer David Marquez started the company in July 2021, and launched their beta later in August that year.

The company was then accepted into Southeast Asian startup accelerator Interative.

The shipping aggregator then later raised $500,000 or P25 million in seed funding from Y Combinator.

Shipmates is the eighth startup from the Philippines to be accepted in the Silicon Valley-based startup accelerator, joining the likes of Paymongo, Kalibrr, NextPay, and MadEats.