Outvio, an Estonian startup that provides a SaaS fulfilment solution for medium-sized and large online retailers, has closed an approx. €2.5 million financing round led by Change Ventures, with participation from TMT Investments (London), Fresco Capital (San Francisco), and Lemonade Stand (Tallinn), as well as several angels, including James Berdigans (Printify) and Kristjan Vilosius (Katana MRP).
This is the startup’s first round of funding, and will be used to expand their marketing and development teams, building on the success they’ve already achieved in Spain and Estonia to launch services throughout Europe. This is also one of the largest first rounds of investment in an Estonian startup in the last four years.
Outvio states that there are more than a million online shops in Europe, with 4 billion parcels shipped every year. A number of tools exist to easily build an online shop and market products, but when it comes to the post-payment customer journey, there are significant gaps. Existing solutions focus on individual stages of the shipping process, but none provide an end-to-end, streamlined solution that tackles the entire post-purchase customer journey. Once they reach a certain size, Outvio states that online retailers have no choice but to use a number of different tools or hire expensive developers to create in-house solutions.
With Outvio, online stores of any size can offer their customers a “better-than-Amazon post-purchase experience”. They can manage and automate all processes after the sale, including shipping orders, but most importantly, they can control everything that happens after the order has been shipped. This allows online retailers to provide a first-class, branded customer journey, with real-time order status updates on a custom tracking page, and a self-service portal to handle all their returns.
Outvio is also highly customizable. Even for the biggest online stores processing tens of thousands of orders every month, it just takes a couple of days to set up Outvio and be up and running. Outvio also integrates with all major e-commerce platforms and marketplaces including Shopify, WooCommerce, and Amazon.
“We can give any online store all the tools needed to offer a superior post-sale customer experience. We can integrate at different points in their fulfilment process, and for large merchants, save them hundreds of thousands in development costs alone. What happens after the purchase is more important than most shops realize. More than 88% of consumers say it is very important for them that retailers proactively communicate every fulfilment and delivery stage. Not doing so, especially if there are problems, often results in losing that client. Our mission is to help online stores streamline everything that happens after the sale, fueling repeat business and brand-loyal customers with the help of a fantastic post-purchase experience,” said Juan Borras, co-founder and CEO of Outvio.
Outvio’s white-label architecture makes it possible to customise branding and communication at all stages of fulfilment to create opportunities to remarket and close the customer journey loop. Outvio also offers integration with its network of couriers or allows customers to connect to their own couriers. For larger customers looking for a high degree of customization, the app offers its own API.
“The market for shipping and fulfillment apps is worth €2.5 billion in Europe alone, but none of those solutions take a holistic, integrated approach for the post-payment customer journey. Before Outvio, I used to run my own online store, so I knew very well all the pain points. However, we didn’t want to create just another shipping solution, but instead solve a bigger problem for online stores needing to manage tens of thousands of orders per month, while also allowing smaller stores to benefit from the same technology, which would be otherwise out of their reach, for less than your average gym subscription,” said Kaidi Tiitson, Outvio’s co-founder and CMO.
Until now, the startup had been completely self-funded since its launch in early 2018, and in 2020 grew its revenue over 500%. Outvio will use the new funding to hire marketing specialists and developers to expand the product capabilities and awareness as it eyes European expansion.
“It’s no secret that e-commerce is growing fast, but it still accounts for only about 20% of global retail. While online retailing has a long way to go, the expectations of consumers are increasing when it comes to delivery time and standards. The same can be said about the online shop operators who increasingly look for more advanced solutions with consumer-like user experience. The Outvio team has understood exactly what the gap in the market is and has done a tremendous job of finding product-market fit with their modern fulfilment SaaS platform. Their excellent performance without any external financing is a demonstration of their ability to lead Outvio to success, and we look forward to facilitating their continued growth”, said Rait Ojasaar, Investment Partner at lead investor Change Ventures.
