San Francisco startup Passport announced a $39 million Series B round Tuesday led by TCV to build out its logistical services for international shipping supply chains.
Flexport, FJ Labs, Pure Imagination, M13, Resolute, River Park Ventures and several individual investors also participated in the round.
The company's founder Alex Yancher was running another startup as COO when he realized that international shipping was overdue for an overhaul. So in 2017 he left Lynks, an online marketplace for consumers in Egypt, to launch Passport.
Yancher saw an opportunity to improve the entire experience for both merchants and customers in the international shipping sector, which is complex as a result of cross-border regulations, duties and taxes, tracking, transportation, customer service and potential returns. It also takes time.
"What I realized in handling the shipping for Lynks is that you have to marry best in class physical logistics with the technology and customer experience side," Yancher told me.
The company counts hundreds of brands as clients — including Kylie Beauty, Bombas, Native, Ritual and Seed.com — that use Passport to label, ship and track their international orders. It charges them by the pound, aligned with industry standards. And Passport partners with dozens of logistics carriers around the world to make sure parcels get through each leg of the journey to a customer's door, including processing returns, as needed.
Passport currently has more than 60 employees around the world, including the U.S., Canada, Russia and Egypt, and Yancher wants to double that this year.
This new funding will help the company build out its physical and technological services.
"We're really doubling down on our physical logistics efforts and that's building on top of an international shipping consolidator called Access Worldwide, which is based in Atlanta, that we acquired last year. Now that we have a leadership team in place for that piece of the puzzle, we're gonna be investing a lot into that," Yancher said. "And the second piece is on the digital front. There's all these problems about international (shipping). We're trying to build software that greases the wheels of cross-border e-commerce and makes shipping abroad and being in compliance super, super easy."
This is Yancher's second go at running a startup. In 2012 he co-founded Pantry, a grab-and-go fresh meal provider that was acquired in 2016 by Byte Foods, a San Rafael-based startup that manufactures automated vending machines and refrigerated kiosks.
