UniUni founder and CEO Peter Lu has an ambitious goal for his company: Achieve the famed $1 billion “unicorn” status by 2025.
En route this track, the Richmond-based delivery technology upstart last year raised $20 million in Series B financing from Celtic House Venture Partners, Freshwave Capital, and others to power a logistics platform that leverages the gig economy to optimize what the industry refers to as “last-mile delivery.”
With a total of US$60 million in funding, the growing UniUni is expanding geographically in 2024, including south of the border into the US.
UniUni is “disrupting the B2C last-mile delivery model with an asset-light delivery and logistics platform optimized for ecommerce and a variable-cost model for driver recruitment, dispatch, and routing,” according to Celtic House Venture Partners’ David Adderley, whose firm continues to invest in the startup through Series B tranches.
“In the past few years, UniUni has achieved a hundredfold growth, and has accomplished the goal of complete coverage in Canada,” added Celtic House Asia Partners managing partner Jie Chen in December.
Now, UniUni is “extending its services into the United States” and “demonstrating its rapid expansion capabilities,” according to Chen.
“The penetration rate of e-commerce in North America has always been dragged down by expensive and slow logistics,” the investor said, “and we believe that there will definitely be logistics companies specifically serving e-commerce that will disrupt the traditional logistics industry.”
Founded in 2019, UniUni delivers tens of millions of parcels annually from Coast to Coast in Canada, and boasts more than 50 distribution centres throughout North America.
The startup currently has more than 6,000 drivers across Canada, plus “a growing armada in the US,” where it already reaches 20% of the American population after one year of operating in the States.
Adderley of Celtic says that UniUni has “proven itself in Canada,” and consequently is “extremely confident” the firm can do the same in the United States.
The United States currently sees daily parcel volume north of 80 million and a market size approaching US$200B.
UniUni recently ranked fourth in the Globe and Mail’s 2023 list of top growing Canadian companies, with a three-year growth rate of more than 12,000 per cent.
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