E-commerce fulfillment and technology solutions provider Shipmonk, cofounded by Czech-born Under 30 honoree Jan Bednar, announced that it has a $65 million growth equity investment from Periphas Capital.
The investment comes a month after Shipmonk’s $290 million equity financing round led by Summit Partners.
The way Shipmonk operates is by doing e-commerce fulfillment and providing the software for online orders. The company takes the physical product, puts in their facilities across the world, connects with all the different sales channels that people sell on, and get them to the customers.
Jan Bednar, the founder, and CEO of Shipmonk who made the 2018 Under 30 Retail & Ecommerce list, says that the company charges for storage, fulfillment, and shipping.
“The core is we keep the product inside the warehouses, charge the customers based on the types of the location they are taking, and every time there is an order that comes through that we pack and ship we charge them for that particular order,” Bednar says.
Shipmonk counts 1200 customers of various sizes, including brands like BrüMate, Liquid IV, Cuts Clothing, FEAT, and CatLadyBox. Last year, the company generated north of $150 million in revenue.
Bednar is originally from Mlada Boleslav and initially came to the U.S. at the age of 16 in 2008 to go to a summer language school for two weeks. He then got a scholarship to play hockey for a local high school in North Carolina.
While in high school, Bednar started a business doing package forwarding. He was buying products in the United States and shipping them to friends, especially for brands that were not as easy or cheap to find in the Czech Republic at the time, like Under Armour or Victoria’s Secret.
After he graduated from high school, Bednar attended Florida Atlantic University (FAU), where he further developed and expanded his business, and won first place at a business competition, getting a $30,000 check.
Bednar later won another competition and got into accelerator gaining a total of $70,000, a cash prize he ultimately used to apply for an investor visa, permission to work in the U.S. given to immigrants who develop a business plan and present a certain amount of money in their bank account.
Since officially registering ShipMonk in 2015, the company has grown to 1000 employees, the vast majority of which are in Florida, and a smaller team of 60 people in Prague.
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