Shypyyarda startup that develops business planning products and services for brands and direct-to-consumer merchants, secured $3 million in seed funding.
The round was led by Gradient Ventures with the participation of Liquid 2 Ventures, Position Ventures and a group of angel investors including current and former executives and founders of Shopify, BigCommerce and SnapCommerce.
Dan Li founded the company in 2021 with Samping Chuang while working at LinkedIn. His younger sister wanted to start an e-commerce business to sell jewelry, but didn’t know how. Li went to business school and as he learned more about the e-commerce market and talked to others there, he found that his sister’s problem was shared.
Leveraging Chuang’s expertise from working at a major Shopify agency in Japan, they started Shypyard to build supply chain planning tools, including inventory, supply, demand, and replenishment, to grow brands so they reducing the number of consistent stock outs, causing inventory to lock in cash and difficulty predicting and predicting which stock should be on hand.
“This kind of planning is a daunting and unfamiliar task, but it has a major impact on the health of the business,” Li told londonbusinessblog.com. “It’s like taxes — it’s tedious to do by hand, but it affects your life if you don’t do it.”
Li explained that many of the comparable supply chain analytics and intelligence firms, such as Anaplan, have advanced tools for larger companies, but are not as accessible to entrepreneurs and small businesses.
Those small businesses also don’t have the professional teams to implement the tools. By targeting that small trader niche with easy and simple tools, Shypyard is “democratizing access to planning tools for entrepreneurs,” he added.
The company’s technology has been working with a dozen pilot customers for eight months now and has a handful of paying customers. The new funding will enable the company to hire additional employees, improve product development, increase customer acquisition and scale its artificial intelligence and decision-making capabilities.
“With the current macro environment we are in, entrepreneurs are being inspired to start something, but are now facing headwinds,” said Li. “We help them manage their inventory percentage so they don’t miss out on revenue opportunities or help with cash flow during downtime.”
Inventory infrastructure continues to be a major attractor of venture capital. Last week Ghost announced new funding for its market approach to managing excessive inventory. They followed Syrup Tech, which raised $6.3 million in new funding for its predictive inventory recommendation platform, and joined other similar companies, including Zipdi and Inventa.