Shipwell helped its customers ship more than 10,000 pounds of medicine and 46 million pounds of food during the peak of the coronavirus.
“That was very gratifying for the team — to see businesses be able to do more with the resources they already had,” co-founder and president Jason Traff said.
Shipwell, a platform that uses AI and machine learning to track shipments, also helped keep Amazon stocked with cardboard boxes, which Traff, who makes frequent purchases on Amazon Prime, appreciated.
Oh, and Forbes recently named Shipwell one of its next billion-dollar startups — the only Austin company on the list.
“As a business, we’ve grown by 300x over the past two years,” Traff said.
The company has raised $47.5 million in venture capital funding to date. April and May have been some of Shipwell’s best months ever, though “the customers we work with have had a rough time,” Traff said.
“For us, one of the areas we’ve always been really strong in is food and beverage companies,” he said. “So many of those brands saw a surge period. When you have all this data and you can provide this level of tracking, you can run a more seamless operation.”
Shipping used to be a back-office operation utilizing spreadsheets, emails and faxes.
“Even if they are past that stage and they are using software, it’s legacy software,” Traff said. “It’s kind of like a very basic CRM. Now more than ever, businesses are viewing supply chain and shipping as a competitive advantage. E-commerce has become a bigger and bigger part of their lives.”
Transportation management is a traditional industry, and Shipwell had two “bold visions,” Traff said. First, “shipping was going to become part of the brand experience” and second, “the velocity of shipments was going to pick up largely because of the rise of e-commerce.”
Shipwell tracks trucks through a half-dozen different ways and compiles “a million different data points during the day,” Traff said. “Because we are modern and on the Cloud, we’re connected to a lot of trucking fleets out there.”
The more companies know about where a shipment is, the more proactive they can be about possible problems, he said.
“If you have a plant, oil rig or factory having to shut down because a part is needed and no one knows where it is,” that’s a problem, Traff said.
One of the reasons Shipwell, which launched in 2017 and employs about 100 people, has thrived during the pandemic is “so many of our employees work in our own platform. We have a fully remote workforce.”
Shipwell’s headquarters are in Austin, and it has an office in Chicago. The company is hiring across the country, Traff said. It currently has five positions listed in Austin or remote.
The nod from Forbes, he said, is a “real milestone for the team.”
“The companies highlighted in the past have been extraordinary,” he said. “For my co-founder Greg and I, we’ve always been fascinated by hard problems.”
Traff ran an oil painting reproduction business in Hong Kong before Shipwell. Shipping was always the No. 1 source of customer complaints, he said.
CEO Gregory Price did supply chain consulting for Fortune 100 companies.
Do they think they’ll become a billion-dollar company?
“Transportation is a multi-trillion dollar industry,” Traff said. “As long as we can stay focused on delivering this amazing customer service that we do, that puts us on the right trajectory.”
