Bringg Raises $30M to Help Businesses Improve Their Delivery Operations

by Ellen Glover
April 7, 2020
Chicago-based Bringg raises $30 million to improve deliveries amid coronavirus pandemic
Image: shutterstock

Bringg, a startup that helps businesses large and small manage their delivery operations, announced Tuesday it closed on a $30 million Series D round, bringing its total funding raised to more than $83 million.

These days, especially in the midst of the coronavirus crisis, consumers want their goods delivered quickly and at a low cost. Bringg CEO and board member Guy Bloch says that the companies that dominate this corner of the market right now are online marketplaces like Amazon and Instacart.

“They’ve invested a lot of money in two things. One is to build the technology that allows them to digitize and connect every resource in the fulfillment network. The second thing is they built a fulfillment network — they built their own drivers, they built their own warehouses,” Bloch told Built In. “When you have all the fulfillment network digitized and connected, they are in the best position to see all the moving parts. They are in the best position to make decisions, millions of decisions, optimal decisions, every day.”

On the other hand, most restaurants, retailers and grocery stores don’t have that same technology or network to come anywhere close to Amazon and Instacart’s scale and efficiency. That’s where Bringg comes in.

“We are here to make convenient, cost effective and fast delivery accessible, usable and valuable to everyone, from the smallest business to the biggest business,” Bloch said. “We’re here to give the world an open platform and, in essence, every business can become a kind of Instacart model and work with full digitization and customer experience and efficiency.”

Bringg helps businesses manage the logistics of the delivery process by digitizing every aspect of it. Companies can track drivers’ schedules and dispatch orders while drivers can communicate their availability and alert customers to the status of their order. Even if the company doesn’t operate its own fleet of delivery people, Bringg allows them to work with third-party services like DoorDash and Postmates and still manage their products.

Bloch says the company will be using this funding to increase its headcount by about 250 people over the next three years in its offices in London, Tel Aviv, Brazil, Toronto and Austin, as well as its Chicago field headquarters.

More immediately, the company is also releasing its BringgNow feature, which was designed specifically with small and medium-sized businesses in mind. Bloch says the company was originally going to launch the solution in Q3, but decided to release it early in response to the COVID-19 crisis’ impact on small businesses all over the world. The pandemic, he says, has led to an increased reliance on delivery and gig economy workers like drivers for small businesses.

“We saw the desperate need of every business today to deliver because shops are closed,” Bloch said. “With the increase of demand coming from consumers sitting at home and needing things to be delivered today combined with the gig economy that is now expanding, it’s become almost a necessity in times of [the coronavirus].”

Bringg is already seeing the impact of coronavirus on its business. In just the past week, the company has seen a 24 percent week-over-week increase in customer delivery volumes across restaurants, grocers and retailers using the platform. Bloch says he doesn’t see this trend going away anytime soon, even when the virus eventually dies off.

“We are talking about a period of a few months before we’ll go back to normality, but by the time we go back, normality will be new,” Bloch said. “This is the new normality. It’s what we anticipated would happen in a couple of years, but it’s happening now. It won’t stay at this extreme, but it won’t go back to what we knew just a few weeks ago.”

Jobs at Bringg

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