Flexport

Flexport provides ocean, air, truck and rail freight forwarding, customs brokerage, trade finance, insurance and e-commerce fulfillment, managed through a software platform that connects shippers, carriers and suppliers. Brothers Ryan Petersen and David Petersen founded the company in 2013, and it is headquartered in San Francisco. Flexport says 13,000 brands use it, that it operates across 135 countries, and that customers have moved more than $175 billion of goods through it since inception.

Early investors included Founders Fund, First Round Capital and GV, and the company had raised $304 million by 2017, including a $110 million Series C. A Form D filed in May 2019 reports $604 million sold toward a $1.1 billion equity offering that began in April 2019. In February 2022 Flexport announced a $935 million Series E at an $8 billion valuation, led by Andreessen Horowitz and MSD Partners, with a strategic investment from Shopify and participation from existing investors DST Global, Founders Fund, SoftBank Vision Fund 1 and Kevin Kwok. That brought total funding to nearly $2.3 billion. In January 2024 Shopify invested a further $260 million through an uncapped convertible note.

Flexport remains private. Former Amazon consumer chief Dave Clark became chief executive in June 2022 and resigned in September 2023, after which Ryan Petersen returned to the role. In May 2023 Flexport acquired Shopify's logistics business, and Shopify received a 13% equity stake and a board seat in exchange. In November 2023 it bought the technology assets of Convoy, the digital freight broker valued at $3.8 billion in 2022 that had shut down weeks earlier, without assuming its liabilities. Flexport reported revenue of $2.1 billion for 2024.

Flexport shows how a pandemic freight boom can reprice a logistics company quickly. Its 2022 round priced it at nearly triple its last reported valuation from 2019, and the follow-on capital in 2024 came from a strategic investor through a convertible note rather than a priced round. More than a decade after founding, backers from the seed and Series C era, including Founders Fund and First Round Capital, have no public-market exit, and the Convoy asset purchase illustrates how late-stage logistics capital can be consolidated cheaply in a downturn.