Latvian startup Swotzy secures €500,000 pre-seed funding for last-mile logistics

Swotzy, a Latvian last-mile logistics provider, has raised €500,000 in a pre-seed funding round. Promising savings on shipping costs and delivery performance insights, the company says it intends to use the investment to ramp up product development and establish a foothold in the Baltic market.

The €500,000 portion of Swotzy’s pre-seed round was provided by Gdansk’s Black Pearls VC, with Vilnius’ Firstpick continuing their support of the company, having provided the startup €90,000 just four months prior.

While the heady days of “delivery before 1 p.m.” might be coming to a close and the e-commerce boom showing signs of slowing, if not collapsing altogether, Swotzy might very well be a member of a second generation of companies that inevitably follow a boom and the sometimes associated bust.

Printful problems

The company is the brainchild of Lauris Rutkis, former Logistics development and partnerships manager at Latvia’s Printful. It was here that he began to see flaws in the last-mile delivery matrix and began to formulate a response.

As expected at the pre-seed stage, the company is still in the theoretical phase, at least in some places, as a portion of the investment capital is earmarked to begin work on a suite of data analysis tools.

As a testament to what the company is working on, not only has the sector they’re entering undergone tremendous changes in the past few years, as well as become increasingly crowded, the Latvian company has managed to garner a healthy amount of capital to get things moving in a tumultuous time for raising funds.

Rutkis commented:

“This pre-seed investment really confirms that it’s not just us seeing the big problem we’re trying to solve—VCs see it too. They understand that by staying focused on providing valuable solutions to our customers, we can ramp up our operations. Moreover, they see how these additional resources can fuel this progression even faster.

“Getting another cash injection so soon really bolsters our confidence to keep going full steam ahead, but now with some extra firepower.”