08 September 2022, Philippines – Shipmates, Philippine-based shipping platform backed by Y Combinator and Iterative, announced that it had raised US$ 2.2 million or ₱125 million in a seed funding round. The seed round was participated by Cathexis Ventures, Wavemaker Partners, Taurus Ventures, Capital X, Sketchnote Partners and other prominent investors.

The company plans to scale its platform to be the preferred shipping tool of all the merchants in the Philippines and improve the country’s shipping infrastructure by helping both online businesses and shipping companies.

Founded by CEO Josh Supan and CTO David Marquez, the startup helps e-commerce businesses grow by making their shipping process easier and faster. The platform allows online business owners to book standard or multiple orders, as well as compare rates between different couriers.

In 2021, the e-commerce market was the leading contributor to the internet economy in the Philippines, with an estimated gross merchandise value of $12 billion — a 132 percent increase from 2020. This is expected to hit $26 billion by 2025.

“When talking to online sellers, their biggest pain point has always been how manual shipping still is in our country. We built Shipmates to automate this, we built Shipmates for them and we are very glad to be joined by our amazing investors in making this vision a reality,” Supan said.

“Instead of shippers booking couriers manually on their phones or physically dropping off packages, their orders feed straight into Shipmates, and they can pick a courier for shipping from there,” he added.

Supan and Marquez started Shipmates back in July 2021 and launched their beta later in August that year. Following this success, the company got accepted in SEA startup accelerator, Iterative. The shipping aggregator then later raised $500,000 or ₱25 million in seed funding from Y Combinator. It is the 8th startup from the Philippines to be accepted in the Silicon Valley-based startup accelerator, joining the likes of Paymongo, Kalibrr, NextPay, and MadEats.

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