As e-commerce experience leaps forward in almost every area and easy-to-create online shopping platforms grow manifold, more retailers are seeking a customer-centric shipping experience to finish their customers’ journey. Hence, the last two years have witnessed VCs opening up their hearts and of course, their wallets to invest in logistics startups, especially those in the last-mile delivery space.
Joining the race is London-based logistics startup Packfleet. Originally founded by a team of early-Monzo employees, the platform has now raised an £8 million funding to grow its team, expand delivery areas, and scale up operations to support its recent growth.
The oversubscribed seed round was led by Creandum with participation from General Catalyst, Entrée Capital, and Founder Collective, as well as influential angel investors and operators in the space including, Sanne Manders (COO Flexport), Olli Neumann and Moritz Claussen (Cargo.One founders), Heini Zachariassen (Vivino founder), Matt Robinson (Nested CEO) and Freddy Macnamara (Cuvva CEO).
The startup had earlier raised a £1 million pre-seed investment in July 2021 from General Catalyst and Entree Capital, as well as angel investors, including Tom Blomfield and Jonas Huckestein (Monzo co-founders).
So how does the platform operate? It claims to bring the tech that you’d expect from the likes of Deliveroo and Uber to the world of parcel delivery. Every delivery gets live tracking on your phone and the option to change anything about the delivery (including the address) at any point on your parcel’s journey. And for the merchants who are its customers, there’s a whole host of benefits that the startup claims to offer, including flexible collection windows, live updates on every delivery, built-in instant chat for customer support, direct Shopify integration, and a 99.9% delivery success rate.
Add to this a tinge of sustainability. Packfleet is pushing the boundaries from an environmental point of view, with a 100% electric van fleet (charged by renewable electricity), a tree planted for every single delivery, and carbon offsetting for every staff member (including drivers) as default, helping to accelerate the green transition for home deliveries.
Starting with small independent businesses, the company is now also expanding to larger companies.
Tristan Thomas, CEO and co-founder of Packfleet said: “We started Packfleet to build a world where independent businesses can compete with (and beat) Amazon and seeing the response from customers has been amazing. We’re creating a tech-enabled customer experience backed by green energy and fairly-paid drivers.”
Gemma Bloemen, investor, Creandum added: “Everyone who lives in the U.K. and has ever ordered something knows the delivery experience is broken. The startup is here to disrupt this market in a truly differentiated way. It has created a green delivery experience that is seamless, intuitive and efficient for customers and merchants alike.”
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