The latest round of funding was led by Mubadala Capital, whose investment in Huboo reinforces its growing B2B portfolio in Europe.
The funding is due to Huboo’s exponential growth driven by a sea-change in e-commerce penetration in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Huboo, the software-driven full-stack e-commerce fulfillment platform, today announced the closing of its £ 60 million Series B financing led by Mubadala Capital. This new investment adds to the £ 14 million in Series A funds raised last year and will help drive Huboo’s expansion into continental Europe.
Founded in 2017 by Martin Bysh and Paul Dodd, the company has expanded its operations from a warehouse in Bristol to operating four logistics centers across the UK. It has recently opened a site in the Netherlands and plans to roll out its operations in many other European markets over the next 12 months.
To date, Huboo has acquired over 1,000 customers, ranging from small direct-to-consumer (D2C) merchants to larger e-commerce brands, solving critical challenges in their order fulfillment process, from warehousing and inventory management. to logistics and order shipping.
Many e-commerce companies today run their entire order fulfillment process in-house, largely due to the prohibitive prices of outsourcing the process to third parties. Following an increase in e-commerce sales in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) have been increasingly looking for affordable solutions that can support their compliance process and allow them to ship a growing number of products in a fast and profitable way.
Huboo’s end-to-end order fulfillment service provides merchants with a full-stack solution including an intuitive and easy-to-use trading platform that integrates multiple online sales channels and marketplaces, an in-house developed warehouse management software and a network of warehouses divided into highly efficient micro-hubs.
The company’s trading platform uses APIs to integrate with popular sales channels and online marketplaces such as Amazon, eBay, and Shopify, allowing D2C brands to view and track orders and manage their inventory in a single, real-time dashboard. . Huboo has also developed proprietary software to manage warehouse operations and continually optimize inventory layout.
Leveraging its technology stack, the company runs a network of physical warehouses that are divided into modular micro-hubs of only a few hundred square feet each. These small hubs enable the Huboo team to collect and pack inventory with high variability in a smarter and more efficient way, while providing exceptional customer service. Huboo’s storage model is not only scalable, but also capital, which means that a new site can be launched within a few weeks.
Huboo’s long-term mission is to become the operating system for e-commerce companies in Europe, a single platform that enables customers to manage inventory and fulfillment, manage their existing distribution channels, implement new sales channels with a simple click of a button, build your own store front and access a range of useful e-commerce related services through the Huboo business app store.
The increase comes after an incredible 24 months of growth that has seen the company’s revenue grow 10x in 2020. The round was led by Mubadala Capital and was joined by existing investors such as Stride, Ada Ventures, Hearst Ventures, Episode 1 and Maersk Growth, bringing Huboo’s total funding raised to nearly £ 80 million since April 2019.
Bysh, co-founder and CEO of Huboo, said: “Dozens of new and existing retail businesses now see their future in e-commerce, but while anyone can set up an online store and start selling within hours, the infrastructure that drives e-commerce is alarmingly outdated, inefficient, inflexible and
expensive.
