The tech company that solves e-commerce fulfillment for brands and retailers in Latin America raised a $40M Series A round. With this capital, the company will continue investing in technology, expand to Brazil and Chile, and launch embedded finance products.
Zubale, the leading software and gig collaborators marketplace to fulfill e-commerce orders in LatAm, raised a 40 million dollar Series A. The investment was led by QED Investors. Notable investors include GFC, Felicis Ventures, Hans Tung (GGV Capital) and existing investors including NFX, Kevin Efrusy (Accel), Wollef and Maya Capital.
The e-commerce market in LatAm is the fastest growing in the world, estimated to be over $100 billion and expected to double by 2025. The retail sector has great challenges in the region to provide reliable and consistent deliveries in less than 60 minutes, and Zubale offers a solution that allows retailers to solve this need and have successful ecommerce initiatives.
“Retailers are experiencing great pressure from consumers to improve the shopping experience in their digital channels, offering the same speed and quality of delivery offered by applications such as Rappi, PedidosYa, iFood or Cornershop. However, providing these levels of service and speed of delivery requires giant tech work and large capital investment for which retailers are not prepared,” says Sebastian Monroy, Co-founder of Zubale.
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“This was the clear next step in our business, that’s why we wanted a fintech investor at the table and QED got so excited about the business model and execution muscle that they wanted to lead. We were thrilled because we see this as the evolution of Zubale”
“We are changing this with Zubale by helping retailers innovate faster than ever before. We doubled our revenue in the second half of 2021 and expect to double again in the first half of 2022. The interest and potential of our region plus our execution and results, led us to a more than 2x oversubscribed round,” said Allison Campbell, Co-Founder.
Zubale empowers a wide range of retailers from fashion brands, supermarkets, specialty stores, and pharmacies to compete and win against the B2C aggregators while keeping their most important asset: their customers. Leveraging its proprietary embedded software, Zubale fulfills e-commerce orders for retailers through their marketplace of independent collaborators, who pick, pack and ship from the retailer’s assets (stores, warehouses, dark stores, etc.) to the final customer.
“Zubale is transforming the e-commerce fulfillment process across Latin America. Their growth has been stunning over the past 2 years as they’ve delivered a best-in-class shopping experience, completing over 7 million tasks. This enables Zubale to quickly scale with demand while maintaining a very high quality bar,” said Lauren Morton, Partner at QED Investors.
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“We were immediately impressed by the vision and execution of the Zubale team. Their approach to growing opportunities for independent collaborators in the region is a major step forward in financial inclusion and we’re inspired by the ways to grow this impact over time. We’re incredibly excited to be on the journey with them,” added Morton.
This investment will support the Company’s plans to accelerate its growth in current markets and to further expand in Latin America. Zubale started their operations three years ago in Mexico and since then has expanded to Colombia, Costa Rica and Peru. They recently launched Brazil and Chile, where they had already signed partnerships with some of the most important retailers in the region.
“Our goal is very clear: We want to be present, in a very short period of time, in the six most important markets in Latin America. Over the past two years, we have grown steadily 25% month over month and expect to 3X our revenues in 2022 compared to the previous year,” said Sebastian Monroy, Co-Founder.
Today, the company has more than 150 engineers in product, data science, technology and design departments. This investment will allow Zubale to continue investing in these areas and further strengthen its technology and grow its product offering. “We will use this money to overinvest in AI and improve our algorithms to increase delivery speed and NPS for our B2B customers,” added Monroy.
Finally, the company plans to launch its new vertical: embedded finance. This will allow Zubale to provide financial products and services to its gig collaborators. “This was the clear next step in our business, that’s why we wanted a fintech investor at the table and QED got so excited about the business model and execution muscle that they wanted to lead. We were thrilled because we see this as the evolution of Zubale,” finished Campbell.