eCommerce fulfilment scaleup Huboo has raised £29 million on the back of a seventh successive year of growth.
The Bristol company says the new investment will be used to propel it to profitability, market expansion and sustainable long-term growth.
It comes from existing investors including Ada Ventures and Maersk plus additional support from lenders HSBC and Blackrock, and takes total investment to date to £122m.
Huboo recently announced 100% growth over the past 12 months, raking in more than £25m of new business and adding 800 new clients to its rapidly expanding portfolio, which includes leading UK drinks brand AU Vodka and sports clubs West Ham FC and Bristol Sport.
Earlier this year it announced plans to cut 60 jobs at its Bristol head office as part of cost-cutting measures. The company said it had reduced overheads by approximately half in the last 12 months “as tough economic conditions continue to impact pan-European eCommerce”.
Huboo’s European presence, which includes Netherlands, France, Spain and Germany, has also grown in 2023, with the Dutch operation passing £5m ARR for the first time earlier this year.
“Despite a challenging fundraising environment, the latest investment round is a testament to the confidence our investors have in our long-term vision and strategy,” said Martin Bysh, CEO and co-founder.
“Our team has worked incredibly hard over the last 12 months to maintain our growth trajectory despite a poor macro outlook for eCommerce, introducing new services, like introducing automation for Enterprise clients, to enhance our customers’ experience and sustain our mission to revolutionise, simplify and transform eCommerce fulfilment.”
Founded by Bysh and CIO Paul Dodd in 2017, Huboo started from humble beginnings, with just two safe storage lockers in Bath and has since grown to 10 warehouses across Europe and a total headcount of over 750.
While many businesses find it hard to access efficient, cost-effective fulfilment to support their eCommerce aspirations, Huboo utilises software to drive smarter, more productive and human-centric warehouses.
The company’s software provides a complete end-to-end fulfilment proposition – including transaction management, stock control, order tracking, billing and integration with popular sales channels and marketplaces, such as TikTok, Amazon, eBay and Shopify, enabling the company to directly receive and process retailers’ orders in real-time.
At the warehouse itself, Huboo houses its teams in self-contained ‘micro hubs’. These replicate the inputs, processes and outputs of a complete warehouse within a few hundred square feet. This approach allows teams to work quickly, intelligently, and on a set client portfolio, as well as meaning workers no longer have to walk miles every day. It says this process not only means that clients liaise with the same team members, but creates meaningful jobs that reduce annual warehouse staff turnover at Huboo to just 2.5%, compared to some warehouse statistics of 205%.
Matt Penneycard, partner at Ada Ventures, said: “Never in my career in VC have I seen an investment opportunity with the scale prospects of Huboo.
“Ada Ventures invested in the first round, and every round since, because we saw the opportunity to mix state-of-the-art technology with operational know-how in a sector that had yet to be digitised.
“The upside is effectively unlimited here, and the team has more than justified all of our faith since that first investment.”