Swyft raises $17.5 million to bring same-day delivery to all the retailers that aren’t Amazon
Thanks to major players like Amazon and Walmart, we’ve become accustomed to next- or same-day delivery. But the pandemic has also renewed our interest in buying from smaller businesses and retailers.
Swyft, a company that has just raised $17.5 million in Series A, helps retailers of any size provide affordable same-day delivery. The round was co-led by Inovia Capital and Forerunner Ventures, with participation from Shopify and existing investors Golden Ventures and Trucks VC.
Swyft is a marketplace, connecting a network of shipping carriers with vendors. But the company also provides software to those carriers to make them more efficient, and turns them into a vast network that allows them to pick up more inventory without adding to their infrastructure.
Kirsty O Connor/The Associated Press
After joining Amazon.com as an engagement manager in 2019, Aadil Kazmi was inundated with calls from independent merchants he knew. They all wanted to know how they could get faster, affordable shipping for their online orders, just like the e-commerce goliath offered – and had conditioned online shoppers to expect.
So he quit his $200,000-a-year job, abandoned his stock options and co-founded a company to provide the same level of speedy shipping to merchants in Amazon’s shadow. That was one year ago.
On Wednesday, Mr. Kazmi’s Swyft Technologies Inc. announced it had raised US$17.5-million, led by Inovia Capital and San Francisco’s Forerunner Ventures, after quickly establishing itself as a provider of previously unattainable Amazon-level delivery service at affordable prices to merchants in Toronto, Vancouver and Ottawa.