ShipHawk provides a platform and API that aggregates quotes from hundreds of specialized carriers for large, heavy, or unusually shaped items, allowing customers to choose by price or speed and offering a price guarantee. It started as a web app where users manually entered shipment details and has been shifting toward becoming the shipping-pricing API for third-party e-commerce platforms and marketplaces. The company is working to expand its shipping engine integrations across a wider range of e-commerce platforms to bring transparent shipping costs into purchase flows. ShipHawk was the audience choice winner at Startup Alley during TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013 and has spent the last year-and-a-half improving its service and signing integration partners. Financially, the company closed a new funding round to support expansion and integration efforts and has raised a total of $6 million in outside funding. ShipHawk is based in Santa Barbara, Calif., has around 20 employees, and has been operating for the last two years or so. ShipHawk offers a fully featured online shipping platform that generates shipping estimates without requiring items to be pre-packed and coordinates pickup, packing, insurance and delivery for residential and commercial addresses. The service acts as a referral marketplace, collecting finder’s-fee commissions from carriers, packers and insurers rather than performing fulfillment itself. The product is live as a web MVP, with a mobile app on the roadmap once initial launch markets are stable. ShipHawk is initially serving Southern California with plans to expand across the U.S. and is exploring deeper partnerships with carriers such as FedEx. Founders Jeremy Bodenhamer and Aaron Freeman bring prior retail shipping and logistics experience—Freeman has ten years in shipping and Bodenhamer acquired Freeman’s Santa Barbara retail shipping store. The company aims to become a household name for shipping similar to how Expedia aggregates travel options.

Total raised

$6M

Funding rounds

2

Latest round

Series A

Latest activity

Oct 2014