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Shipyard, which develops business planning products and services for brands and direct-to-consumer merchants, closed on $3 million in seed funding.
The round was led by Gradient Ventures, with participation from Liquid 2 Ventures, Position Ventures and a team of angel investors that included current and former executives and founders at Shopify, BigCommerce and SnapCommerce.
Dan Li founded the company in 2021 with Saping Chuang while working at LinkedIn. His younger sister wants to start an e-commerce business to sell jewelry, but she doesn’t know how to do it. Lee went to business school, and as he learned more about the e-commerce market and talked to others, he found his sister’s plight was common.
Leveraging Chuang’s expertise from working at a large Shopify agency in Japan, they started Shypyard to build supply chain planning tools including supply chains to grow brands to reduce the number of consistent stock outs, tied up cash, and the difficulty of forecasting and forecasting what inventory they have on hand.
“This type of planning is a very difficult and unusual task, but it is very important for the health of the business,” Lee told TechCrunch. “It’s like taxes – it’s annoying to do it manually, but if you don’t do it, it affects your life.”
Lee explained that many of the same supply chain analytics and intelligence companies like Anaplan have sophisticated tools for large companies, but they’re not accessible to entrepreneurs and small businesses.
Those small businesses don’t have professional teams to implement the tools. By targeting that small merchant space with simple, easy-to-use tools, Shipyard is “democratizing access to planning tools for entrepreneurs,” he added.
The company’s technology has been working with about a dozen pilot customers for eight months and has a handful of customers. The new funding will allow the company to hire more employees, increase product development, increase customer acquisition and increase artificial intelligence and decision-making capabilities.
“In our current macro environment, entrepreneurs are motivated to start something, but now they’re facing headwinds,” Lee said. It’s helping them manage their share price so they don’t miss out on income opportunities or lose a boost in cash flow.
Inventory infrastructure continues to be a major attraction for venture capital. Last week, Ghost announced new funding for its marketplace to manage excess inventory. They follow SyrupTech, which has raised $6.3 million in new funding, joining other similar companies including product recommendation platform, ZipD and Inventa for the evaluation.
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