Veho, a platform that facilitates next-day delivery for e-commerce brands, announced Tuesday that it raised $125 million in Series A funding and is now valued at $1 billion.
Veho was founded in 2016 in Denver, where it established its first warehouse, according to a company spokesperson. Veho also went through the Techstars Boulder accelerator program in 2019.
The company has since expanded to 14 markets, and with the new funding, plans to reach 50 markets by the end of 2022. The new tech unicorn also plans to open its headquarters in New York City in 2022.
Veho currently employs 400 people in the U.S, with more than 60 Colorado employees working in Denver, Colorado Springs and Fort Collins. With the new funding, the company expects to hire more than 1,000 employees, including an estimated 100 employees in Colorado, a company spokesperson told Built In via email.
The funding round was led by General Catalyst and included additional participation from Construct Capital, Bling Capital, Industry Ventures, Fontinalis Partners and Origin Ventures.
Veho is an e-commerce logistics platform that matches the demand for package delivery with a crowdsourced marketplace of qualified drivers who finish the next-day delivery with an average on-time performance of 99.9 percent, according to the company.
Aside from punctuality, Veho also differentiates itself through its “personalized” approach, letting recipients know the time their package is expected to arrive and when the driver is en route, and allowing users to reschedule, change their address or provide delivery instructions in real-time.
More than seven in 10 recipients interact with Veho about their package delivery, which the company said is evidence of the need for personalization in the package delivery market.
“We’re providing e-commerce brands a fast, tech-forward and customer-centric delivery option that ensures brand perception makes it past the purchase, all the way through to the customer door,” Itamar Zur, Veho’s co-founder and CEO, said in a statement.
According to the company, e-commerce companies that use Veho have seen a 20 percent increase in customer repurchase, a 40 percent increase in customer lifetime value and an eight-point increase in net promoter score compared to customers who received their package from a traditional shipping company.
“The role of last-mile logistics in e-commerce is more important than ever and Veho is bringing much-needed innovation to a space that has for years struggled to keep up with the dramatic increase in demand while focusing on a superior consumer experience,” Kyle Doherty, managing director at General Catalyst, said in a statement.
