Cross-border trade may become increasingly tricky as new tariff waves are introduced in different markets. Today in timely news, a startup founded in London is called exchange – This is a tool for e-commerce companies to better browse in the world of cross-border transactions – announcing a $40 million expansion.
ICONIQ Growth is leading the Series B, also from Cherry Ventures, Qed Investors, Portfolio Ventures and 9900 Capital. The funding will be used to build the existing footprint of the company with UK businesses and to expand expansion plans for the wider Europe, the United States, as well as Australia and Canada.
Funding has brought some business momentum. Dating deals have become about 500 brands for clients. Swap has been winning the business with a platform that provides its users with a place to manage logistics and transportation operations, including inventory, revenue and product recycling, i.e., the functionality that is often handled (or improperly) in a more decentralized manner.
Its initial traction has been a long time, and in the future it plans to build software that meets the specific needs of other market segments such as beauty, home products and consumer technology.
SWAP CEO Sam Atkinson said he and his co-founder and Zach Bailet came up with the idea of establishing exchanges after their experience in online business. Previously, the two had begun their own business of handmade goods from Africa, importing them to the UK and then shipping them to buyers around the world. Their direct-to-consumer brand is called slow goods.
“As you can imagine, the logistics is very difficult,” Atkinson said. “We bought things from Burkina Faso, beautiful handmade shawls, carpets and lampshades, bring them to the UK and then fulfill the order from here.”
As the business grows, more than 18 months of operations become more complicated.
“We can’t make it work,” he said. “But we learned a lot about the challenges of getting an e-commerce business to do business and importing goods and shipping them out.”
The two took the experience and submitted it, then worked in consulting at McKinsey and Deloitte respectively, and then Atkinson was head of strategy at Fintech Juni. The two knew they wanted to work together again and build something. Now, having more experience in building technology for businesses, re-examining their own experiences and working to solve these experiences is the challenge they want to deal with.
Interestingly, while the founders are directly aware of pain points and have a vision of how to fix them, neither comes from a technical background. Atkinson said the technology backend was developed by a team from Israel.
Exchange citations Research that forecasts that the global cross-border market is due to be worth $7.9 trillion by 2030. If this plays out, that speaks to a huge opportunity for companies like Swap (and others in the same space, such as Shopify) to target smaller businesses that want to tap the internet to sell to more people, but might want to avoid, or at least diversify from, leaning on third parties like Amazon to do that.
Seth Pierrepont said that since the market has reached $1 trillion, it also means that when and tariffs do take effect, they may work to improve efficiency to reduce the costs associated with sending goods globally.
“You don’t have to look far to see the headlines [point to] Trade protectionism has increased. Obviously, this is a very dynamic tariff environment. “He said. “The cross-border supply chains and businesses are already complicated, and now we are adding. We think software providers can really do a good job of all these headaches. ”
He said that for another reason, he did buy the idea of a single supplier that offers multiple logistics tools: data.
“Having all of these solutions in one platform gives you unified data, which only enables more complex operational insights over time, which allows you to do more fun things. And, you know, the company is growing very quickly.”
