A Latvia-based company with strong Charlotte ties has reached unicorn status after raising $130 million in capital.
Printful, based in Riga, Latvia, announced the investment on May 24. The funding was led by New York City-based Bregal Sagemount and establishes Printful's unicorn status. A unicorn is a privately owned company valued at $1 billion or more.
Printful, a print-on-demand company that prints and ships products for e-commerce retailers, was co-founded in 2013 by Davis Siksnans, Lauris Libervs and Agris Damanis. Siksnans said Printful allows its customers to sell custom products without having to deal with or invest in inventory themselves.
"One of the problems is, it’s very hard to guess what’s going to sell and very difficult to manage inventory against the demand," he said. "Sometimes things are produced and end up in the landfill. Our company is trying to fix that part of the problem by only printing things when something has been bought."
The company's stateside headquarters is in Charlotte, where it has two locations. It opened a 53,000-square-foot facility at SteelePoint in west Charlotte last year. Printful's original facility opened in 2016 on Westlake Drive in southwest Charlotte.
More than half of its 800-plus employees are based here.
As of April, the United States was home to 262 unicorns. In Charlotte, the most notable is AvidXchange, a tech-based payment automation provider that reached unicorn status in 2017. Siksnans said Printful is not only one of just a handful of unicorns based in the Queen City, but also the first in Latvia.
"It was an important factor that this funding would be able to deliver the Latvian community its first unicorn. In the U.S., it’s more common, but even in Charlotte, there aren’t many," he said. "It is a status symbol in the startup technology space, and it’s recognition for our team and all of the effort we have done over these eight years."
Siksnans said the company was bootstrapped up until this point, and the team is looking forward to the future as Printful aims to scale even more in the U.S. and across the globe.
"We decided that it’s time to take on an investor who can help, not only with the capital, which we need, but with growth," he said. "This is the most ambitious expansion we’ve ever had. In 2021, we’re opening up more facilities than ever before, and we’re buying more in capital expenditures than ever before."
