On Monday, Wonderment, a new e-commerce startup created by a team of Boston-based tech veterans, announced it raised $6 million in fresh seed funding. The round was led by CRV (formerly known as Charles River Ventures), with participation from Underscore VC and Defy.vc. They were also joined by several prominent local business leaders, including Klaviyo co-founders Andrew Bialecki and Ed Hallen, as well as some founding employees of HubSpot.
Founded in March of 2020 — now a fateful era for not just the e-commerce industry, but also the entire country — Wonderment is the brainchild of three longtime participants in Boston’s tech startup ecosystem. CEO Jessica Meher, a former marketing executive at Notarize and HubSpot, first came up with the idea with Klaviyo alum Brian Whalley as a way to help small businesses tackle struggles related to customer retention and the supply chain. They soon brought on Wesley Abbey, a former software engineer at local standouts Wayfair and Drizly, to help create tracking technology.
Together, the three of them pooled their collective knowledge about e-commerce and software, and set out to build a platform that could enable small businesses to deliver, what they call, “Amazon-like shopping experiences.”
“When we founded Wonderment a little over a year ago, one thing was clear: what worked for the previous generation of direct-to-consumer companies would no longer work for the next,” Meher wrote in a recent blog post, citing “skyrocketing” customer acquisition costs, an “explosion” of supply chain disruption and the “demise” of third-party data as just a few things putting DTC merchants as a disadvantage. “We believe the online shopping experience is broken.”
These hurdles can have a huge impact on whether or not a customer will shop at one of these retailers again, even if it is completely out of the business’s control. Meher says 83 percent of consumers are less likely to re-purchase from a retailer if they have a negative shipping experience. Wonderment aims to solve that problem by allowing small businesses — particularly those on Shopify’s e-commerce site — to track shipments and automatically notify customers about delayed or lost packages by pulling data from shipping carriers and warehouses.
“Transparency is a powerful weapon to increase loyalty and combat customer churn,” Whalley said in a statement. “Before, brands were blindsided by delays and playing whack-o-mole with support tickets. Now with Wonderment’s shipping intelligence and workflow automation, brands can be proactive instead of reactive, lightening the loan for support agents and improving repeat purchase rates.”
Of course, the relationship between e-commerce businesses, their customers and the entire supply chain industry, has been under more scrutiny than ever amid the pandemic — good news for companies like Wonderment looking to tackle it. In fact, Meher says its business grew more than 1,000 percent last year, and the startup brought hundreds of brands across the U.S., Canada, Europe, Australia and New Zealand onto its platform.
This speedy growth is what initially attracted a prominent VC like CRV, an early investor in Twitter that, most recently, has backed success stories like Carrot Fertility and Airtable. Reid Christian, a general partner at the firm, says Wonderment has “tapped into a big, unmet market opportunity.”
“Wonderment understands the needs of its customers like no other,” Christian said in a statement, adding that the startup’s “initial outcomes and amazing year of growth prove that this model is much-needed.”
To keep up, Wonderment will use this fresh funding to further build out its platform, as well as grow its team.
