Zubale, a Mexico-based company providing tools to retailers to scale their digital channels, brought in another $25 million in what co-founder and CEO Sebastian Monroy is calling a Series A extension round.
QED Investors led the investment and was joined by an investor group that included NFX and Kevin Efrusy.
We last wrote about Zubale when it closed its $40 million Series A round in 2022. At the time, it was focused on fulfilling e-commerce orders for retailers amid the jump in new consumers across Latin America purchasing items online.
While e-commerce adoption is slower in this region, compared to countries like the United States, the number of online shoppers in Latin America is expected to grow 20%, while revenue is poised to double to over $300 billion over the next four years, according to Statista.
The company uses a network of independent workers who pick and pack items and then deliver them. After securing the Series A, Zubale was working with three large retailers and had tens of thousands of gig workers using its marketplace across Mexico, Colombia, Costa Rica and Peru. Monroy also moved to Brazil to begin operations there.
Sebastian Monroy, co-founder and CEO of Zubale. Image Credits: Zubale
Nineteen months later, Zubale added both Brazil and Chile as new markets and works with more than 115 clients, including Carrefour, Walmart, Cencosud and Chedraui. It has over 100,000 freelancers on its platform who completed more than 30 million tasks. The company also more than tripled its net revenue annually, Monroy told TechCrunch via an email interview.
“Drawing on the valuable insights gained from our years of collaboration with leading retailers, we have dedicated substantial resources to refining our technology,” Monroy said. “As a result, we have transitioned from the primary focus on a gig workers marketplace for e-commerce fulfillment to establishing ourselves as a powerful ecosystem of e-commerce tools.”
That core freelancer marketplace product, FlexiFleet, is now among two other solutions, both software offerings. Consumer Connect improves consumer shopping experiences using WhatsApp, while Fulfillment Optimizer is an end-to-end modular software to increase productivity in e-commerce operations, for example, picking, packing and delivery.
These products helped retail customers not only increase EBITDA, but also improve net promoter scores by over 20 points, according to the company.
The new investment, which brings Zubale’s total venture capital raised to date to $73 million, will be deployed into growing all three of those products, developing new offerings and strategies to consolidate its presence in Mexico and Brazil. For example, in Brazil, the company signed over 10 of the top market retailers, Monroy said.
Though Monroy declined to say the company’s valuation following the new investment, he did say it “multiplied our valuation” compared to the Series A in 2022. Zubale plans to raise a Series B in 2024.
“We are getting very close to profitability and we aim to do so in the first months of 2024,” Monroy said. “This will give us a lot of flexibility to accelerate strategically, especially in Brazil where we are just getting started.”
