Like Shyp, Airhouse exists to take the pain out of shipping. But its customers are direct-to-consumer brands, and it aims to avoid some of Shyp’s missteps.
By the time on-demand delivery startup Shyp collapsed in March 2018, its cofounder and CEO, Kevin Gibbon, was already thinking about his next company. More than two years later, Gibbon unveiled Airhouse, cofounded with former Shyp marketing chief Sarah Siwak.
With Airhouse, merchants can outsource their shipping in a more sweeping, scalable fashion. Instead of handing off items in small batches, its customers store them at warehouses that handle individual fulfillment — existing warehouses that Airhouse has struck deals with to create a nationwide network.
According to Gibbon, Airhouse quietly began operations in November and already has dozens of direct-to-consumer customers, including Revolution Robotics, Not Pot, and Caldo.
Unlike Shyp, which hired couriers and packers and built its own warehouses, Airhouse is a purely cloud-based business that doesn’t operate warehouses or employ people to wrangle products itself.
Gibbon and Siwak have gotten Airhouse up and running on $4.5 million in seed funding, a modest budget compared to Shyp, which raised $60 million from investors. Investors include Casper cofounder Neil Parikh, Quiet Capital’s Lee Linden, AngelList’s Naval Ravikant, Product Hunt founder Ryan Hoover, and Warby Parker cofounder David Gilboa.
