While a lot of recent airtime has centered around consumers and whether or not they'll receive their gifts in time for the holidays, the businesses who supply those goods face serious challenges of their own.
The root of the problem is simple, but the solution is not. E-commerce brands that sell physical goods operate within a tricky cycle, first purchasing goods from a vendor and then selling those to their customers. Unfortunately these brands are on the hook for paying their vendors before they've had a chance to sell through their inventory, making it challenging to scale quickly.
Combined with COVID, labor shortages, and massive disruptions to an already-strained supply chain, these everyday challenges have compounded, pushing cash flow to top of mind for young and growing businesses alike. Since launching in late 2019, we've seen hundreds of leading e-commerce brands turn to Settle to help them streamline their inventory purchasing and bill pay, and we've been grateful to act as a partner in helping them through these choppy waters.
We started out by building the fastest and cheapest way to pay vendors, but soon layered on financing to our product offering to truly change the trajectory of these businesses for the better. If a customer chooses, they can have Settle pay a vendor for goods upfront, and then pay Settle back once they've made some sales.
When we launched last summer, knock-on effects from the pandemic caused a massive shift in retail from offline to online. Though neither we nor our customers predicted the magnitude of the shift that would take place, with Settle they were able to buy adequate inventory to meet consumer demand. In just a matter of months, we grew from 0 to 100 merchants.
Today, we’re thrilled to announce we've closed our $60M Series B, led by Ribbit Capital and including existing investors Kleiner Perkins, Caffeinated Capital, among others. We’re very fortunate to have Ribbit—the best of the best in fintech—on our team, and especially for Nick Shalek to join our Board.
So what's next? These funds will be used to continue growing our world-class team (we’re just 40 people today), building out products and integrations that our customers need, and scaling so we can continue partnering with merchants to help them grow faster and smarter than ever before. We'll continue taking a holistic approach to solving problems for our customers. By combining payments, accounting, and lending, into one solution, we’re making it a no-brainer for fast-growing brands to use Settle.
If you're interested in joining, check out our job postings (we're fully remote BTW, but have optional offices in SF, NYC, and Lviv). If you don't see an exact match, send us an email and pitch us!
(PS—check out our feature in TechCrunch! 🎉)
