Shipmates

Shipmates is a Y Combinator-backed startup that lets Philippine online sellers manage all of their shipping in one place, comparing rates across multiple courier partners and booking deliveries without juggling separate accounts and dashboards for each courier. It was founded in July 2021 by CEO Josh Supan and CTO David Marquez, who launched a working beta of the platform within a month of starting the company, during a period when the pandemic-driven boom in online selling had made shipping logistics a real bottleneck for small Philippine merchants.

The platform integrates nine courier companies as of its most recent funded round, and distinguishes itself by being, according to its own description at the time, the only Philippine shipping aggregator combining both on-demand couriers (same-day motorcycle-style delivery) and standard nationwide couriers on one platform, letting a seller pick whichever is cheaper or faster for a given order.

Shipmates raised US$2.2 million (roughly ₱125 million) in a seed round announced in September 2022, backed by Y Combinator and its affiliated accelerator Iterative, along with Cathexis Ventures, Wavemaker Partners, Taurus Ventures, Capital X, and Sketchnote Partners, among other investors. The round was earmarked for scaling the platform and improving the Philippines’ broader shipping infrastructure for online merchants.

Small and mid-sized online sellers in the Philippines typically need to sign up separately with multiple courier companies to get the best rate or coverage for a given delivery, which means juggling several logins, comparing prices manually, and manually re-entering order details into each courier's own system.

Small and medium online sellers and merchants in the Philippines, particularly those running shops on social media or marketplaces, who ship frequently enough that comparing and managing multiple couriers by hand becomes a real time cost.

Shipmates combines on-demand, same-day couriers with standard nationwide shipping providers on a single aggregator platform, which its founders described as unique among Philippine shipping tools at the time of its 2022 raise, letting a merchant choose the right delivery speed and price for each individual order rather than being locked into one courier's service level.