We recently invested in Fulfillment Bridge, a promising startup empowering online merchants to control their eCommerce logistic supply chain and scale their business cross-border.
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End customers expect to receive their e-commerce products anytime and anywhere within a very short time between order and delivery, with excellent service and high convenience. Shipping and fulfillment have thus become a major battleground for retailers looking to acquire and retain e-commerce customers. However, 43% of small businesses either use a manual process to track their inventory or do not track it at all.
Supply chains have become increasingly global and fragmented to include a sprawling ecosystem of disparate and siloed providers, each at different stages of technological maturity. This reduces the ability of small and medium e-commerce sellers to provide an in-house fulfillment service, as sellers would have to engage with several different providers (e.g. warehousing, shipping and last-mile), using a multitude of different systems or platforms.
Fulfillment Bridge provides a fully integrated fulfillment service to e-commerce sellers in multiple countries across Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and America by leveraging their 24 connected warehouses in 17 countries and supporting more than 200 couriers.
Fulfillment Bridge’s global fulfillment solutions for e-commerce businesses
Fulfillment Bridge recently expanded its services to offer its “MEA Bridge” solution that provides a complete end-to-end direct-line fulfillment supporting cross-border trade from, to, and within the Middle East and Africa, while still maintaining its global operations. Another example of their efforts to provide a complete end-to-end solution is their recent launch of the first compliant International Payment-on-Delivery solution in Morocco, enabling Moroccan consumers to order from international eCommerce websites and pay for their orders upon delivery.
Newtown Partners, through the Imperial Venture Fund, invested a significant amount in Fulfillment Bridge’s pre-Series A round alongside leading investors such as Sawari Ventures and Acuity Ventures. Fulfillment Bridge aims to use the capital raised to aggressively scale into new markets across the MENA region.
Alongside the blistering growth of eCommerce globally, Fulfillment Bridge aligned with our supply chain visibility thesis. This showed that providing visibility into the supply chain is table stakes to compete and the true value lies in providing predictive, value-added insights. Fulfillment Bridge is building these capabilities and providing merchants the tooling to build amazing businesses. Furthermore, our Leading Partner, Imperial Logistics, has deep expertise in the fulfillment vertical and acquired ParcelNinja in South Africa for an undisclosed sum.
“I think Kais and his team have the market insight, the relationships and the determination to succeed at creating a phenomenal digital logistics service provider. They’re looking to solve a massive supply chain and logistics problem for eCommerce merchants in the Middle East and Africa that want to expand into new geographical markets but don’t have the scale of setting up location fulfillment operations. The work that they’re currently doing for their customers in MENA is just the tip of the iceberg, “ said Llew Claasen, Managing Partner at Newtown Partners.
The Fulfillment Bridge team is a force of nature. Operating across multiple geographies and timezones, we have suspicions they may be vampires as they answer our messages at all times of the day and night. Commerce doesn’t sleep and neither do they. We are excited to be part of their journey.
