\n<\/p>\n
Ingrid<\/a> \u2014 a startup out of Stockholm, Sweden, not this writer (unfortunately) \u2014 has raised \u20ac21 million, or just under $23 million, to fuel the growth of a business aiming to improve the last, messy mile of online shopping, delivery. Using data science and some big ideas about how delivery will evolve in the years ahead, the company is on an ambitious track to expand to more markets in Europe.<\/p>\n Among the many stress points in e-commerce machine, delivery has long been seen as one of the more painful ones. It can cost a lot (both to buyers and sellers); the process feels very out of everyone\u2019s hands especially when something goes wrong (especially annoying when we\u2019ve paid for that \u2018privilege\u2019); it can feel like it has undue environmental impact; and it\u2019s been turned into a competitive edge by behemoths like Amazon with its Prime memberships offering \u2018free\u2019 shipping, making it something any other retailers will be forever chasing with a direct hit to their margins.<\/p>\n \u201cDelivery is the biggest unsolved puzzle is delivery part,\u201d Piotr Zaleski, Ingrid\u2019s co-founder and CEO said in an interview. \u201cIt\u2019s where most things go wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n Ingrid has seen all of this, and it believes it can fix it, with a platform that it has built to cover what Zaleski describes as the \u201cend-to-end\u201d delivery experience.<\/p>\n By way of an API, its services are integrated into a retailer\u2019s purchasing flow, so that buyers can get a more accurate, and earlier idea of shipment pricing to avoid check-out shock and subsequent cart abandonment.<\/p>\n Ingrid provides integrations with whichever delivery providers a particular retailer uses \u2014 and can help those retailers add in more carriers, or delivery points \u2014 to provide choices to consumers around which delivery service, speed and price they want to use. Ingrid then helps manage the process post-sale process, from tracking the order to the customer and also helping with the returns process if it\u2019s needed, by way of the fact that it acquired a returns specialist, Turnr<\/a>, last year and integrated it into its bigger platform.<\/p>\n And in case you are at all curious: Ingrid the business was not named to ensure coverage in TechCrunch by me, Ingrid. It was a more random decision: Zaleski and his co-founder Anders Ekman (chief business development officer) wanted a relatable and positive name that would resonate in its first markets, in the Nordics; and that it could export but keep some of its Scandinavian ethos in the future branding. Searching on different names, it found that Ingrid.com was registered to a private individual \u2014 a woman whose father worked in tech in the 1990s and presciently bought a domain name for his daughter with her name, in case she needed it one day. The Ingrid founders were shocked to see that it wasn\u2019t snagged already by a domain squatter asking for a ridiculous price, as so many of the simplest domains are; and so it made a deal and managed to get her to agree to sell it.<\/p>\n Turning back to Ingrid the startup, the company\u2019s basic understanding is that for any retailer that is not Amazon, fulfilment and logistics are not the core of what they do, and for those whose speciality is delivery, they are not experts in e-commerce, so providing a service that can stitch these together better will be useful to both.<\/p>\n Ingrid\u2019s platform currently serves some 250 customers across 180 countries, and to date it\u2019s processed 130 million orders for them (currently around 40 million annually). It\u2019s not disclosing revenues or valuation with this round, which brings the total amount raised by the startup to \u20ac32 million.<\/p>\n Ingrid has identified a very obvious problem that most certainly can use fixing, but it also faces a few challenges.<\/p>\n The first of these is what Zaleski admits is a \u201ccold-start\u201d problem. It\u2019s much easier for a company to build out a business on a network of existing relationships, than it is to build that business from scratch. So, while the company has now an impressive 20% share of the consumer market in its home country of Sweden \u2014 which Zaleski spelled out to me as \u201cmore than 15% of consumers\u201d shopping online will use Ingrid in one way or another \u2014 and while that will serve it to grow well in the years to come judging by the acceleration of the business now; it spells more challenges when Ingrid wants to break into totally new markets.<\/p>\n One solution to that is to ride on the coattails of its bigger customers and expand by working with them in new markets, which is what Ingrid is doing. \u201cThe only way is to build a hell of a platform that retailers want to use to take a volume position,\u201d Zaleski said. Ingrid\u2019s current customer list includes Paul Smith, ME+EM, Sneakersnstuff, Estrid and Farmasiet.<\/p>\n