Logistics startup by ex-Rocket Internet execs gets funding from 500 Startups

Photo courtesy of Easyship.

Logistics startup Easyship tells Tech in Asia today that it has raised an undisclosed amount of pre-series A funding from 500 Durians, Silicon Valley VC 500 Startups’ fund for Southeast Asia. The Hong Kong-based company also announced its entry in Singapore.

“After a big success in Hong Kong, Singapore is our next destination. It’s important for its strategic access to the Southeast Asia market,” says Easyship’s head of growth Jakub Zakrzewski.

To date, Easyship has raised US$2.5 million in funding.

The startup was born out of a hurdle encountered by its co-founders Tommaso Tamburnotti and Augustin Ceyrac while they were trying to build the cross-border business of Rocket Internet’s Lazada.

“I was called to Hong Kong… the plan was to have as many ecommerce sellers as possible from Hong Kong and China selling on Lazada to our clients in Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and the Philippines,” recalled Tommaso in a previous interview.

“Sales grew rapidly, but soon the problem of shipping internationally showed up and we found ourselves dealing with a very unstructured and fragmented logistics industry.”

Tommaso Tamburnotti pitches Easyship at the Tech in Asia Singapore 2015 Arena battle.

The sellers, he shared, were spending 40 percent of their time packing items and choosing which of the dozens of couriers to use for shipping. It was a total mess.

Easyship came up with a solution: an end-to-end process for pickup, packing, labelling, shipping, and tracking of goods. It later evolved into a cloud API for couriers. “So the products don’t go through our warehouse anymore. It’s the courier that comes directly to the client location,” says Jakub.

The service is free, and sellers only pay couriers to ship their items out, with discounts of up to 70 percent on normal rates – another upside.

Easyship makes money by taking a cut from the couriers instead. “Because we have volume we can negotiate better discounts from them and later on add our small markup there. So we all win – the courier has a new customer, we get a markup, and the customer gets a cheaper price,” explains Jakub.

In Hong Kong, over a thousand companies now use Easyship to expand their business internationally, saving up to US$20,000 per month on shipping fees, Jakub shares. He wouldn’t disclose their revenue figures.