The Latin America based logistics service company for e-commerce vendors, 99minutos is making fast efforts to attract funding as the company has announced $82 million in Series C funding. The round was led by Oak HC/FT and an existing investor of 99minutos, Kaszek and Prosus also participated in the round. The last round of funding bags a $40 million Series B funding in May 2021 from Prosus and Kaszek, which brought the total valuation of the company around $128.7 million.
Alexis Patjane, CEO of the company has shared that he wasn’t readily looking for additional capital after the last round, but had plans to begin raising again in the present year. However, there were new opportunities with new customers and the company was growing with good interest from the venture capital firms. He also mentioned the round has a life-changing impact on him. With contacting 77 funds and only 3 reverting as a positive response, it was demotivating for the company, but the current brand positioning has helped the company to show interest from the other side helping to make things move at a good pace. Patjane was eagerly interested in speaking with Oak HC/FT because of the company’s global presence in the market. Although the valuation has not been disclosed by the company, Patjane mentioned that he would be able to make a bigger announcement in the next round.
99minutos has announced a raise of $82 million in Series C funding round led by Oak HC/FT.
Since the entry of e-commerce companies like Amazon in Mexico, there has been a lot of frame-work around the industry which has been overtaking the traditional companies like FedEx and DHL, which were present before, but could not survive due to reasons like country-specific deliveries, higher costs and unavailability of daily deliveries, as they were not connected to technology. The e-commerce market in Latin America is assured to reach a value of $160 million by 2025, with an estimate of $85 billion in 2021.
With this valuation, 99minutos believes that it needs to be the first tech company to come up with the logistics services that are required to scale and provide the fast delivery services like next day deliveries instead of 10 days from the day the order has been placed, and other specialized services. The company has opened over 500 stations, where people can pick up/drop off their packages, making it into a hub. Currently, the company is controlling more than 15 million packages a year and aims to deliver them the latest by the next day of order via their fleet of EVs. According to Patjane, the fresh capital will be invested to scale the business models, geographic expansion in Latin America and other new initiatives by the company to reduce carbon emission and increase the adoption of EVs.
The company is controlling more than 15 million packages a year and aims to deliver them the latest by the next day of order via their fleet of EVs.
In the present day, the company has a team of 5,000 employees working from Colombia, Peru, Mexico and Chile, and Patjane aims to double the manpower by the end of this year. The company is dealing with more than 120,000 customers, which are mainly B2B companies, and the revenue generation has increased thrice over this year.
