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Bringing APIs to Platform State – TechCrunch


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Happy Saturday, friends; I hope you are fine. As you read this, I’m back to my regular digging job in the Northeast, leaving sunny New Orleans behind. Well, next week’s post will be more emotional because of the weather. Regardless, I have two things to talk about today, so get busy! – Alex

As APIs evolve into platforms

Earlier this week, The Exchange chatted with the founder and CEO of Shippo Laura Behrens Wu about her company’s announcement that it has start cooperation with Shopify.

Shippo is entering the shipping game, offering SaaS offers to merchants that get them access to bundled freight rates and therefore cheaper. Last year the company raised $45 million at a valuation of just under $500 million. (Back in 2019, when the company raised 30 million dollarsBehrens Wu says her company has the same gross margin as SaaS, for reference.)

The company grew rapidly, doubling its shipping volume in 2020 — which at the time loosely tracked revenue — and doubling in size in 2019.

In early 2021, when we last signed up with Shippo, it had a neat plan ahead of it to sustain that growth (emphasis added):

Now with more capital, what’s next for Shippo? According to its CEO, the startup wants to invest more in platforms (for example, where Shippo is included in a marketplace)expanded internationally (Shippo only does “a little bit” of international shipping, according to Behrens Wu), and doubled down on what it considers to be its core customer base.

This week, Behrens Wu said that offering delivery is now “staking” for both the platform and the marketplace, so individual sellers expect that if you give them a digital storefront digital, they expect payment support along with shipping options. Shippo wants to be the shipping engine that platforms provide.

The executive said that after receiving interest from the markets about 18 months ago, her team set to work building an API for its service to allow others to bring Shippo’s service to the table. their market.

There’s a revenue-sharing component to the deal, according to Behrens Wu, but with Shopify and other potential partners providing huge revenue gains, the math could work out well for Shippo. That’s because its service gets better with volume. The more packages Shippo helps to ship, the better deals it has with shipping companies around the world. And now it has a way to dramatically expand its total volume, perhaps improving its ability to decouple monetary value from the world of e-commerce shipping.

We’ll need to check with the company in a few months to see how things are going, but it all feels pretty optimistic.

Behrens Wu reached out after noting our report on the growth of startups using APIs. Well, now that the company has an API that is key to its overall growth trajectory, our thesis is that: SaaS is neat, but APIs could be the future business model to beat. .

Insurtech: Not dead yet!

It’s not too barbaric because the horses are out of date, but insurtech has had a few years of ups and downs. Are from Massive fundraising for neo-insurance startups As far as the big dollars for the insurtech market, we’ve seen a bunch of IPOs that don’t retain value post-launch. It’s messy.

And not yet. Earlier this year, the Exchange wrote that insurtech venture capital is really strong last year despite a flurry of negative news involving some of the industry’s best-known names. Things used to be so hot that we tried to figure out.”Why are VCs pouring money into the insurance market?“In the beginning of 2020.

Well, the VCs are still there. This week’s policy announced that it closed a $125 million round. The company’s software essentially allows consumers to find and buy different insurance products online. Given how large the insurance market is, getting users to the right product is big business. A bit like how Credit Karma is, if you will.

Policygenius competitor The Zebra raised $150 million last April, for reference, so the Policygenius round shouldn’t be a total surprise. But it highlights the fact that public market news can help boost a startup sector, but it can’t – it seems – kill it.





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