On a roll: With latest acquisition, ShipMonk doubles its global e-commerce fulfillment footprint

ShipMonk, the provider of e-commerce fulfillment and technology solutions to help businesses grow, recently announced its acquisition of a leading competitor, Ruby Has Fulfillment, doubling its global footprint. With the acquisition, the Fort Lauderdale-based ShipMonk becomes “the undisputed leader in the market” – that’s according to Ruby Has Fulfillment’s CEO, who will be joining ShipMonk’s top leadership team.

Through the acquisition, the ShipMonk adds eight logistics and fulfillment centers — in New York, Nevada, New Jersey, Kentucky, California, Canada and the United Kingdom — to ShipMonk’s existing network of 11. What’s more, the combination adds about 1.3 million square feet of warehouse space, bringing ShipMonk’s footprint to more than 2.4 million square feet.

ShipMonk’s workforce grew 150% in the last year, and now the acquisition adds 700 more employees, bringing its workforce to over 3,000.

“Our growth has been driven by our ability to deliver excellent customer experiences for our clients with our e-commerce and software capabilities. Ruby Has Fulfillment is an ideal addition to the ShipMonk platform, blending substantial investments in service and technology to complement and enhance our core offering for B2B and larger clients,” said Jan Bednar, ShipMonk’s founder and CEO, in a statement.

Today, ShipMonk serves more than 2,000 mostly small and medium B2C businesses, including BrüMate, one of its longtime customers, Liquid IV, FEAT, and Glamnetic. Ruby Has’  client base, including Brooklinen, The Ridge, and Overtime, adds larger brands and established B2B brands to the company. “As e-commerce businesses boom across every vertical, we are scaling our services to keep pace and deliver the level of quality and reliability our clients rely on and expect for their customers. That’s true whether a business is bootstrapped and just getting started, or an existing enterprise-scale business with high volume and customized operational needs,” said the 30-year-old Bednar, who founded ShipMonk in his Florida Atlantic University dorm room in 2014.

In an interview with Bednar last year after raising significant funding to scale, Bednar said ShipMonk was preparing to expand globally and exploring company acquisitions that could add value to ShipMonk. That’s well underway, helped by the explosion in online commerce spurred by the pandemic. To meet the new demand, this acquisition furthers ShipMonk’s efforts to expand operations throughout the United States as well as to Canada and the U.K.

Rafael Zakinov, founder and CEO of Ruby Has, will be Chief Product Officer at ShipMonk.

“Our shared future is one of considerable promise. With the addition of Ruby Has, the ShipMonk organization is the undisputed leader in the market, delivering the most value to merchants,” said Zakinov. “We have the team, technology, service and reach to grow with our clients.”

ShipMonk is already quite the South Florida success story. Bednar, who immigrated to the U.S. from the Czech Republic at age 17 to play hockey and attend FAU, took part in the school’s accelerator program, FAU Tech Runway, and founded his  company with his winnings from business plan competitions in 2014. Bednar proudly bootstrapped for ShipMonk’s first four years, before raising $10 million in late 2018 to fund its local facility expansion.  Then, in 2019, ShipMonk moved its headquarters from Deerfield Beach to a 220,000-square-foot facility in Fort Lauderdale, with offices and a massive warehouse, and added extensive automation there, as it also made plans to expand that automation in its existing facilities in California and Pennsylvania as well as the new ones the company plans to open.

In December 2020, ShipMonk announced its $290 million raise, led by growth equity firm Summit Partners, and in late January 2021 Periphas Capital led a $65 million round. That set off a growth spurt in 2021 that included massive hiring, new facilities, additional technology and automation, and now acquisitions.

This is the company’s second acquisition – in October it purchased a Mexican fulfillment business that became part of ShipMonk Mexico – and Bednar has signaled there are more acquisitions ahead, both domestic and global. ShipMonk, who has an office and tech employees in Prague, also plans to open a European warehouse in 2022.

Stay tuned.

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Nancy Dahlberg