Cross -border trade could be much more difficult if the wave of new tariffs is introduced in various markets. Today in a contemporary news, a London startup called named To exchange -The tools for e-commerce companies are building in order to better navigate the cross-border trading world, announces for the expansion of $ 40 million in funds.
ICONIQ growth also leads series B with participation from Cherry Ventures, QED investors, portfolio ventures and 9900 capital. The financing is used to build on the existing footprint of the company with British companies with an expansion plan to the broader Europe and the USA as well as Australia and Canada.
The financing comes with a certain business dynamics. So far, the SWAP has selected around 500 brands as customers. Swap has won this business with a platform that offers its users a single place for the management of logistics and shipping processes, including inventory, returns and product recycling functions that are usually treated or abused in a much more fragmented manner.
The initial traction was in fashion, and in the future it is planning to create software for the specific needs of other segments such as beauty, household goods and consumer technology.
Sam Atkinson, the Swap’s CEO, said he and his co-founder and Zach Bailet are the idea of
“As you can imagine, logistics was pretty hard,” said Atkinson. “We bought things from Burkina Faso, beautiful handmade scarves, carpets and lampshades, brought them to the UK and then fulfill orders from here.”
For over 18 months, when business grew, it was only more complicated to lead it, he said.
“We couldn’t get it up,” he said. “But we have learned a lot about what it takes to get an e-commerce business going, and the challenges when importing goods and shipping.”
The couple took this experience and handed them over and then accepted consulting jobs at McKinsey and Deloitte, and then Atkinson spent some time at FinTech June as head of the strategy. The two knew that they wanted to work together again and build something. Now armed with a lot more experience with the establishment of technologies for companies, the review of their own experiences and work to fix them was the challenge they wanted to tackle.
Interestingly, while the founders knew first -hand pain points and had a view of how they could be repaired, not even from a technical background. Atkinson said that the tech baking was developed by a team in Israel under the direction of Oron Bendavid, the VP of Engineering of the startup, and another engineering team was set up in the Netherlands.
SWAP quoted Research These forecasts that the global cross-border market is worth $ 7.9 trillion by 2030. If this has an impact, this speaks for a great opportunity for companies such as Swap (and others in the same area as he Shopify) to address smaller companies who want to make on the Internet to sell more people, but at least diversify that they lean on the Amazon like Amazon to report from thirds like Amazon.
Since the market is already increasing a size of 1 trillion US dollar, this also means that if tariffs come into force, you are likely to make even more efforts to build efficiency in order to reduce the cost of composing objects around the world, said Seth Pierrepont, who directed the investment for the growth of ICONIQ.
“You don’t have to look very far to see headlines that indicate an increased protectionism. It is obviously a very dynamic tariff environment, ”he said. “The cross -border supply chains and trade were already complex, and now we are contributing to this. We believe that software providers are very well positioned to relieve many of this headache. ”
He said that he really bought the idea that a single provider provided several logistics tools for another reason: data.
“If you have all of these solutions on a single platform, you will receive uniform data that only enables more sophisticated operational knowledge over time, which enables you to do more interesting things. And you know that the company has grown incredibly quickly. “
