The delivery operating system for the corner pizzeria - commission-free dispatch, tracking and AI for 6,000+ small businesses that would rather keep their own customers.
There is a version of the delivery economy you already know. You open an app, a stranger brings you tacos, and somewhere in the transaction the restaurant hands over roughly 30% of the order and, more quietly, the customer relationship itself. That model works beautifully for the app. It works less beautifully for the taco place, which now pays a toll to reach a customer who technically belongs to someone else.
Shipday is a bet that a lot of small businesses would like to opt out of that arrangement without giving up delivery entirely. Founded in 2020 by Moin Islam and Adem Esen, the company sells software - not a marketplace - that lets a restaurant, grocer, florist or courier dispatch its own drivers, track them on a live map, send the customer a branded tracking page, and, when it runs short on drivers, tap a third-party fleet like DoorDash or Uber for overflow. The commission on all of that is zero. The subscription is the business model.
The founding story is unusually literal about its origins. Islam earned a PhD in industrial engineering with a logistics focus at Georgia Tech, then spent years doing supply-chain analytics at Western Digital and SanDisk - the kind of résumé that optimizes container flows, not burrito routes. The idea for Shipday came partly from volunteer work: he had been trying to help nonprofits move goods around more efficiently and kept running into the same wall. The tools that made local delivery manageable existed only for companies large enough to build them. Everyone else improvised with spreadsheets and phone calls.
Esen, his co-founder and CTO, came out of the same building - a master's in operations research, also from Georgia Tech, where the two met as international graduate students. Their pitch to investors leaned on an analogy that has since stuck: Shipday wants to be to local delivery what Shopify is to storefronts, Stripe is to payments, and Twilio is to messaging. Plumbing, in other words. The unglamorous infrastructure that lets a small operator behave like a big one.
The timing helped. Shipday launched into the 2020 e-commerce surge, when a lot of businesses that had never delivered anything suddenly had to. But the more durable tailwind is structural: gig platforms charge commissions that make sense at scale and hurt at the margins, and a formal small-business sector that the World Bank notes can account for up to 40% of GDP in emerging economies needs delivery software that doesn't assume a Silicon Valley ops team. Shipday was, in its own description, "a global company from Day 1" - it crossed 3 million deliveries across 100+ countries within about two years, and it built the product in 30 languages before most startups have finished translating their homepage.
"This milestone marks a pivotal moment for Shipday as we continue to scale our platform." Moin Islam · Co-founder & CEO
Shipday's promise to a merchant is boring in the best way: set it up before lunch, and by dinner your deliveries dispatch themselves. Reviewers keep saying the same thing - it's the ease of use, not the feature list, that sells it.
Assigns each order to the nearest available driver by proximity, availability and urgency - your own fleet, a third-party one, or both at once.
iOS and Android app for accepting orders, following optimized routes and updating status in real time. Route planning that Shipday says cuts delivery time up to 30%.
Real-time tracking pages under the merchant's own brand, with live ETAs plus room for offers and promotions.
Photos, signatures and timestamps captured on drop-off, so disputes have a paper trail.
Automated collection and analysis of feedback and Google reviews, aimed at turning one-time orders into regulars.
Agentic AI that handles dispatch, driver coaching, refund claims and 24/7 customer calls - the newest layer on the platform.
Shipday runs on freemium SaaS. There's a free starter tier, then paid plans - restaurant pricing starts around $99/month - that scale with delivery volume and features. What there isn't is a per-delivery commission, which is the whole point and the whole marketing pitch. The company layers on revenue from third-party fleet integrations and, increasingly, its AI add-ons.
The customer base skews decisively small: pizzerias, grocery and liquor stores, florists, couriers and D2C sellers, more than 6,000 of them across 100+ countries. External estimates put annual revenue around $2.9M as of 2025 - an approximate figure, and a reminder that this is still an early-stage company selling low-priced subscriptions to a very large number of very small buyers.
Figures per Shipday and public review sites; relative bar widths are illustrative, not to scale.
Co-led by ECP Growth and Ibex Investors (Mobility VC), with B Capital and Supply Chain Ventures participating. Total funding now tops $10M.
Earlier rounds from B Capital, REFASHIOND Ventures and Supply Chain Ventures, who framed Shipday as "Next Gen Logistics" for a post-COVID small-business economy.
"Shipday's AI-enabled platform is purpose-built to drive efficiency and create sustainable value." Jeff Emmons · ECP Growth
PhD in industrial engineering (logistics track) from Georgia Tech; former supply-chain analytics lead at Western Digital and SanDisk. Drew Shipday's founding idea from volunteering with nonprofits that couldn't afford real delivery software.
Master's in operations research, also from Georgia Tech, where he met Islam as an international grad student. Leads the engineering behind Shipday's dispatch, routing and AI systems.
Moin Islam and Adem Esen launch during the pandemic e-commerce surge to help small merchants run their own local deliveries.
Mobile app, route optimization, branded tracking and proof of delivery roll out alongside a growing integration list.
The platform crosses 3M deliveries in 100+ countries and draws early backing from logistics-focused investors.
Funding from B Capital and others pushes the total past $10M and expands the integration ecosystem.
AgentFlow and the AI Receptionist debut; deliveries pass 30M and customers top 6,000 as the Series A closes.
Orders flow in from the tools merchants already run; drivers flow out to whichever fleet is cheapest and closest.
Restaurant point-of-sale integrations push orders straight into Shipday's dispatch.
Online stores sync orders into local delivery workflows without manual entry.
On-demand overflow capacity when a merchant's own drivers are maxed out.