Cross -border trade could be much more complicated with the wave of new rates that are introduced into different markets. Today in timely news, a startup founded in London called Exchange -What is building tools for electronic commerce companies to sail better for the cross -border commercial world, announces $ 40 million in funds to expand.
The growth of ICONIQ leads the B series, with the participation of Cherry Ventures, Qed Investors, Portfolio Ventures and 9900 Capital. The financing will be used to build on the company’s existing footprint with the United Kingdom companies, with an expansion plan in Europe and the US.
Financing comes with some commercial impulse. Swap has accumulated to date about 500 brands as customers. SWAP has been winning that company with a platform that gives its users a single place to manage logistics and shipping operations, including inventory, returns and recycling of products, functions that are generally managed, or handled badly, in a much more fragmented way.
Its initial traction has been in the way, and in the future it is planning to build software that meets the specific needs of other segments, such as beauty, home goods and consumer technology.
Sam Atkinson, Swap’s CEO, said he and his co -founder and Zach Bailet came to the idea of building the exchange of their own experiences in the world of online trade. Previously, the couple had begun their own business obtaining products made from Africa, importing them to the United Kingdom and then sending them to buyers worldwide. His direct brand to the consumer was called slow goods.
“As you can imagine, logistics was quite difficult,” said Atkinson. “We were buying things from Burkina Faso, beautiful handmade shades, carpets and lamp screens, taking them to the United Kingdom and then fulfilling orders from here.”
More than 18 months, as the business grew, became more complicated to handle it, he said.
“We couldn’t make it work,” he said. “But we learned a lot about what is needed for an electronic commerce business to take off and the challenges of importing goods and sending them.”
The couple took that experience and presented it and went on to take consulting work respectively in McKinsey and Deloitte, and then Atkinson spent some time in the Juni Fintech as head of strategy. The two knew they wanted to work together and build something. Now, armed with much more experience in the construction of technology for companies, reviewing their own experiences and working to solve them was the challenge they wanted to address.
Interestingly, while the founders knew first -hand pain points and had a vision of how to fix them, none comes from technical training. Atkinson said the technological backend is developed by a team in Israel led by ORON BENDAVID, the Vice President of Engineering of the Startup, with another engineering equipment installed in the Netherlands.
Exchange appointment investigation That predicts that the global cross -border market should be worth $ 7.9 billion by 2030. If this develops, that speaks of a great opportunity for companies such as Swap (and others in the same space, such as Shopify) to go to the smallest companies that wish to take advantage of the Internet to sell more people, but who may want to avoid, or at least diversify, lean in third parties as hats to do that.
With the market already pressing $ 1 billion of size, what this also means is that, when and if the tariffs come into force, it is likely that they further boost efforts to generate efficiency to reduce the costs of association with the sending of items worldwide, said Seth Pierrepont, who directed the investment for the growth of ICONIQ.
“You don’t have to look far away to see the headlines that [point to] Greater protectionism. It is a very dynamic tariff environment, obviously, ”he said. “Cross -border supply chains and trade were already complex, and now we are adding to that. We believe that software suppliers are very well positioned to relieve many of those headaches. ”
He said he really bought the idea of a single supplier that provides multiple logistics tools for another reason: the data.
“Having all these solutions on a single platform gives you unified data, which only allows more sophisticated operational ideas over time, allowing you to do more interesting things. And, you know, the company has been growing incredibly fast. ”