Today, Berlin-based Karla has announced a pre-seed funding round of €3.4 million and tha launch of its app designed to optimize delivery processes, bringing much-desired transaprenchy to ecommerce orders.
The funding was led by 468 Capital, La Famiglia, and renowned business angels including Jochen Engert (FlixMobility), Oliver Merkel (Flink), and Florian Gschwandtner (Runtastic).
Let’s paint a picture. You’ve just placed an order – almost a daily habit now in this growing ecommerce-world. Now, you have to wait for the delivery. When you’ve ordered something you really want, it’s normal that you find yourself repeatedly tracking and checking the delivery, and it’s sometimes more complicated than it needs to be.
Philippe Padrock, the co-founder of Karla, explained: “Providing consumers with a convenient shopping experience is a top priority for online retailers. Tedious post-purchase experiences, such as a lack of transparency and inaccurate delivery times significantly and negatively impact the customer experience. Two thirds of all customers are less likely to return to the same online shop following a negative delivery experience. Providing customers with a unique solution to fully control their deliveries – from delivery times to drop-off points and returns, will not only increase customer retention, but also improve user satisfaction and significantly reduce the number of complaints.”
Founded in 2021, Karla is reimagining and simpliyfung the frustrating post-purchase experience with its customer communciation platform for merchants. According to a recent Accenture study, 90% of shoppers like to track their delivery status and want deliveries to be easily integrated into their busy lifestyles. Karla intends to address this need and will include an intuitive overview of tracking and visibility across all carriers and online shops.
At the same time, the overall number of packages delivered worldwide is expected to grow at 15% annually and climb to 200 billion parcels by 2025. This parcel volume corresponds to a global e-commerce value of approx €4.5 trillion predicted for 2025. This rapid growth of parcel volumes demands intelligent and efficient parcel delivery solutions that Karla intends to develop and provide to consumers.
Later this year Karla will launch a unique engagement solution that will allow merchants, carriers and consumers to communicate across the end-to-end post-purchase experience. Consumers will enjoy an intuitive interface, giving them an overview of all deliveries, providing a means to manage them with ease and to make individual delivery adjustments. The experience will go beyond the delivery and unboxing moment all the way through returns, refunds, claims, questions and potential repurchases in the future to elevate today’s shopping experiences.
Frederik Schröder, co-founder of Karla continued: “Commerce has not only significantly grown over the past decades it has also evolved immensely to become more convenient for consumers. The logistics industry, however, still lacks innovation in many areas and is not at all where it could be in terms of technology adoption and user centricity. Against the backdrop of the pandemic, online shopping is booming but deliveries remain inefficient driving costs for carriers, congesting urban streets and increasing emissions. With Karla, we will build a platform that connects merchants, carriers, and consumers enabling a step change in delivery execution and the ability to meet evolving customer needs.”
To form the basis for continuous innovation around evolving needs, the founders plan to put the investors’ money to work by enriching the team with significant product, design, engineering, and growth capabilities across experience levels, also including key leadership positions.
