Laura
Behrens Wu

A diplomat's daughter who grew up across four continents walked into a San Francisco post office sometime around 2013, stood in a slow line trying to figure out which shipping carrier was cheapest, and decided something was badly broken. That frustration - specific, mundane, familiar to anyone who has ever shipped anything - became the founding premise of Shippo.

Laura Behrens Wu had been trying to run a small online handbag store. The technology side was sorted: Shopify handled the storefront, Stripe handled payments. But shipping? Shipping required standing at counters, comparing rates by hand, printing labels one at a time, hoping the carrier wouldn't lose the package. It was everything that modern software was supposed to have fixed already - and hadn't.

The Painkiller, Not the Vitamin

She had picked up a useful filter a year earlier, during an internship at LendUp - a Y Combinator-backed startup she'd found on AngelList after meeting a YC founder at a meetup in Zurich. The lesson came from the founder: always build a painkiller, not a vitamin. Vitamins are nice to have. Painkillers, you actually need. The post office line qualified.

In 2013, Laura co-founded Shippo with Simon Kreuz, whom she had met at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland. She was 21 when she first arrived in San Francisco. She dropped out of her master's program - one year in - to pursue it. The company they built was an API that sat between e-commerce merchants and the carrier networks they needed to reach, making it possible to compare rates, print labels, and track shipments through a single interface.

Fundraising by Spreadsheet

The early pitch meetings did not go well. Laura's first dozen investor conversations were, by her own description, terrible. The second batch were better - useful mostly as practice. She kept track of all of it in a spreadsheet: 125 conversations logged, with notes on what stage each reached and what feedback came back. Over 115 of them ended in rejection. She kept going.

The investors who did say yes were chosen carefully. Her advice on this is specific: pick investors who have actual conviction, not FOMO. Strategic advisors who have a real thesis around the investment. Because in every fundraising process, something goes wrong - and you need people around the table who are genuinely in it.

The sequence of rounds that followed reads now like a steady escalation. Seed: $2M from SoftTech VC in 2014. Series A: $7M from Union Square Ventures in 2016. Series B: $20M from Bessemer Venture Partners in 2017. Series C: $30M from D1 Capital in 2020. Then, in quick succession during the e-commerce boom of 2021: a $45M Series D in February, valuing Shippo at $495M. And four months later, a $50M Series E led again by Bessemer, crossing the unicorn threshold at $1 billion.

The Company Behind the Label

Most people who have ordered something online have interacted with Shippo's infrastructure without knowing it. The shipping label on a package from a small Etsy seller or a direct-to-consumer brand - the rate comparison that determined which carrier got the job, the tracking notification that arrived the next morning - that's often Shippo running underneath. The company serves over 100,000 merchants and reached $51.2M in annual revenue. It employs roughly 290 people, with offices including a presence in Ireland that created 120 jobs.

The Shopify partnership announced in 2022 extended that reach further. Shippo became deeply integrated into one of the most significant e-commerce platforms in the world, positioning it not just as a shipping tool but as essential logistics infrastructure for the modern internet economy.

The World Trade Organization and Jack Ma

In 2018, Laura spoke at the WTO Public Forum in Geneva - alongside Jack Ma of Alibaba. The subject was global e-commerce and the possibilities it opens for small businesses worldwide. Her argument was straightforward: you no longer need a physical location to sell internationally. Starting an online business is asset-light. People can focus on what they're actually best at. Shippo was, in a sense, the mechanical proof of that claim - removing one more friction from the path of a small business trying to reach a customer in another country.

Building the Culture, Not Just the Product

Laura has spoken at length about what she calls the "Path to Green" - a framework for company culture that she defines not as a fluffy concept but as an operating discipline. It means that when the company faces a difficult situation, the instinct should not be to wallow but to pivot toward finding a solution. Optimism as infrastructure, not decoration.

She is candid that running a company at Shippo's scale - through a pandemic-driven e-commerce surge, through rapid hiring, through partnership negotiations with Shopify - requires this kind of systematic resilience. The ability to stand back up after falling, she's said, is among the most important skills a founder can have. Not the flashiest. But the one that actually determines who makes it.

The Childhood That Made the Founder

Laura was born in Germany to a father who worked as a diplomat - which meant the family moved. A lot. She spent six years in Beijing, attending German school to maintain curriculum continuity. Then Berlin. Then Ecuador. Then Cairo. She was raised across four countries on three continents before arriving at university in Switzerland, where she studied economics and met the person she would eventually co-found a company with.

That itinerant childhood shows up in how she talks about global commerce - as something natural, as a system she has always moved within rather than something she had to learn to think about. When she says at the WTO that e-commerce makes the world smaller, she means it with the authority of someone who has lived in five countries before turning 20.