There is no such thing as pain-free last-mile delivery, right? Or why we invested in Gophr
By: Saagar Bhavsar
Tags: Fundraise, Last Mile Delivery, VC, Series A, Startup

There is no such thing as pain-free last-mile delivery, right? Or why we invested in Gophr saagar bhavsar Follow Feb 23 · 5 min read

We continue our strong start to 2021 with another announcement: this time, of our investment in Gophr. We’re very excited to lead the £4m Series A round of the London-based start-up and join Seb, Krzys, and the entire Gophr team on their exciting journey to solving B2B last-mile delivery. Gone are the days of all-day delivery slots, missed packages, and lack of transparency. Gophr’s last-mile delivery-platform solves for all that and much more.🚲 🚗 🚚 (and who knows maybe soon, 🚣‍♀️ 🚁 )

Meet the brains behing Gophr

There is no denying it, all of us have had a record-setting 2020 in terms of deliveries: whether it was HelloFresh or any of the numerous restaurants sending us “dine-at-home-kits”, supplies for well-intentioned DIY projects, extra furniture and clothes to complete the WFH look and set the appropriate video conference background, or simply books, arts and crafts materials, or objects that spark joy.

However, one thing that decidedly doesn’t spark joy is usually the delivery experience.

“How hard can it be to tell me when my delivery will arrive? Why can’t I let the courier know that I’ll be stepping out of the house shortly? How come the brand I shopped with doesn’t know where my item is?”

All of these complaints and millions more don’t just lead to end-user frustration, but also to overworked couriers and damaged brand perceptions.

That’s where Gophr comes in: Seb, Krzys, and team have built an end-to-end last-mile logistics platform, that seamlessly sits between customers (those sending items), couriers (those delivering items), and recipients (those receiving items), and uses a data-first approach to automate and optimise all steps from time of placing an order until successful delivery of that order all within the same-day.

Doesn’t matter if you’re an individual or small business that needs something delivered on a given day, or a large multi-national sending thousands of items, Gophr has you covered. By taking into account in-depth customer, courier, location, traffic, and package data, their matchmaking algorithm finds the best courier for any given job, while automating the entire dispatch, pickup, and delivery process for their clients.

It’s extremely straightforward and simple to use. Why not try it out for yourself here.

Hard to show the magic behind the scenes, so enjoy this pretty graphic

The ease of use, massive process improvements and transparency of Gophr are great reasons to have invested in the team. But in the words of Shawn Wayans in Scary Movie, there is more, much more:

Courier-centric solution: All other solutions, regardless of whether they are an incumbent or one of the larger tech start-ups that we all know and order from (but shall not be named), usually squeeze the couriers: in most cases they are underpaid, overworked, lack a sense of agency and have little job security if any. Gophr set out to start with the exact opposite approach, what if they supported their couriers, let them grow their own fleets, and own their customer relationships, while Gophr was the magic behind the scenes? We believe that by returning agency to the couriers and removing misaligned incentives, everyone can benefit. Otherwise you face something like the recent Uber/UK employment tribunal judgment. Product first mentality of the team: Every product design and UI/UX decision was made to cover the needs of all the stakeholders in a delivery. For clients it is super easy to integrate the Gophr solution directly into their check-out systems, providing them with unheard of levels of control and transparency, for couriers all aspects of the tool are there to help them perform their job better while reducing admin work, and lastly for recipients they are finally getting the 21st century experience they have been so sorely missing (shown by an NPS score of 75 vs an industry standard of 0). Natural flywheel effect & high product stickiness: By being embedded in the check-out process of their clients, and by offering both couriers and recipients a better experience than they were used to, Gophr has both a very high stickiness but also a great land and expand model across all stakeholders involved. Capital-efficient model: What attracted us to the team at Gophr has been their highly capital-efficient approach to building and scaling the company to date. Rather than flooding the market with couriers and hoping that the unit economics would sort themselves out at scale, they built a model that rewarded couriers from day-one directly from deliveries (without VC subsidies) while still earning Gophr money on every single ride. The benefits of capital-efficient companies are manyfold as they are often valued higher and their founding teams retain more equity (read more about it here). Moreover, any money raised can go into product refinements and expansion, rather than into covering massively scaling costs. Who said you couldn’t have your cake and eat it too? Massive market opportunity: Delivery and convenience are here to stay. But we haven’t found the right solution to support this legacy system, until now. It’s an entire industry ripe for the taking, and we strongly believe the Gophr approach is the winning and sustainable approach to re-invent this industry for the 21st century. Traction speaks for itself: Gophr has powered the same-day delivery of over 2m parcels, for brands including HelloFresh, Boots, Co-Op, Net-A-Porter. They have seen a 300% YoY growth, and support over 5000 clients in the UK currently.

Thinking one step further, the optimisation possibilities are near endless: as each extra node in your network, has the potential to be a moving, mini pick-up and drop-off point that can further streamline the end-to-end delivery experience. Bringing us to the true delivery experience we are accustomed to in the digital realm but in the physical world. We’re very bullish on what the future has in store for Gophr!

Team Gophr, Welcome to the Nauta Family, we are excited to be part of this journey with you.

🤓 Learn more about Gophr on their website: https://gophr.com/

👩‍💻 Work with a great & experienced team: https://uk.gophr.com/about-us#careers

🎟️ If you’re a courier, sign-up here: https://uk.gophr.com/courier-jobs#apply-now

By Saagar Bhavsar