We’re excited to announce our first investment at Buko Ventures in Shipmates, a new platform for booking and managing last-mile deliveries in the Philippines.

With a messy, fragmented, but rapidly developing logistics landscape in the country, trying to coordinate, book, and track product deliveries across many providers is a big challenge for businesses. Shipmates has already plugged into newly available APIs for many of the largest delivery companies in the country (3PLs) and can now offer businesses a powerful central command center for delivery logistics. Companies can bulk upload tens, hundreds or thousands of daily delivery orders, which are then automatically distributed to 3PL partners based on their respective geographic coverage, performance, and relative pricing. Shipmates has already built APIs into their system for technical clients that want to fully automate their delivery requests. In addition, they are now adding a simple ‘no-code’ option as well for less technical businesses that still want to use their powerful solutions, which is an important strategic move in a country where most companies lack significant in-house technical resources.

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The addressable market is massive. Any Shopify or Instagram e-commerce seller doing significant orders would benefit greatly from a more seamless bulk processing system for managing deliveries. Additionally there are many B2B opportunities for companies that have lots of recurring deliveries to their distributors or branches. Currently there is no other company providing this type of solution for the logistics industry in the Philippines.

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The founding team are two impressive Filipino friends in their late 20s already working on their 2nd logistics-focused startup together. Both graduated from top universities in Manila - David is a software engineer building the technology and Josh is CEO and leading the business side. They are driven, thoughtful, and eager to learn and grow the business.

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We’re big believers in the business opportunity and in Josh and David’s vision and passion for the business. You can reach them anytime at shipmates.app.

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