Packfleet, a London-based logistics startup, announced that it has raised £8M in an Oversubscribed Seed funding round led by Creandum.
Other investors, including General Catalyst, Entrée Capital, and Founder Collective, as well as influential angel investors and operators in the space, including Sanne Manders of COO Flexport, Olli Neumann, and Moritz Claussen of Cargo.One, Heini Zachariassen of Vivino founder, Matt Robinson of Nested, and Freddy Macnamara of Cuvva.
How will the funding be used?
The funding will enable Packfleet to grow its team, expand delivery areas, and scale operations to support its recent growth. The announcement comes eight months after raising £1M in a pre-seed investment round in July 2021.
Tristan Thomas, CEO, and co-founder of Packfleet says, “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 and this funding will enable us to bring that to even more businesses and consumers over the coming months.”
What does Packfleet solve?
A report from Citizens Advice reveals even the top provider like Amazon only scores 55%, and more than 20% of consumers experience delivery problems every single week.
On the other hand, there has been no innovation in parcel delivery for decades since a small number of large incumbents dominate with a universally poor experience built on outdated tech.
And the rise of easy-to-create online shop platforms means there are more retailers than ever seeking a customer-centric shipping experience to finish their customers’ journey.
Here’s where Packfleet comes into play. The company brings the tech that you’d expect from Deliveroo and Uber to the world of parcel delivery.
Revolutionising e-commerce deliveries
Packfleet was founded by a team of early-Monzo employees – Hugo Cornejo, Josh G., Robin Bilgil, and Tristan Thomas, last year, and has since grown rapidly. The company used to focus on small independent businesses, but they are now expanding to larger companies.
They’ve been rapidly growing their delivery areas too over the last few months and already cover a significant portion of greater London, with the long-term vision being national and then international expansion.
Every delivery gets live tracking on the user’s phone and the option to change anything about the delivery (even the address) at any point on your parcel’s journey.
For the merchants, Packfleet offers a host of benefits, including – flexible collection windows, live updates on every delivery, built-in instant chat for customer support, and direct Shopify integration.
Further, the company is accelerating the green transition for home deliveries through 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.
Investor
Based out of Stockholm, Creandum is an early-stage venture capital firm backing successful tech companies in Europe. The VC has backed companies like Spotify, iZettle, Depop, Klarna, KRY, Epidemic Sound, and Small Giant Games. Creandum has offices in Stockholm, Berlin, London, and San Francisco.
Gemma Bloemen, an investor at Creandum says: “Everyone who lives in the UK and has ever ordered something knows the delivery
experience is broken. From the moment we met the team we knew their exceptional product DNA enabled them to disrupt this market in a truly differentiated way. Packfleet has created a green delivery experience that is seamless, intuitive, and efficient for customers and merchants alike. We are very excited to help them scale.”