Clients are banging down the door of this growing Wexford giant of retail deliveries
Scurri is processing over €3 billion worth of goods a year.
“YOU’RE PITCHING YOUR story to people who are interested, what’s better than doing that.”
That’s the outlook of Scurri founder and chief executive Rory O’Connor when it comes to looking for investment, and it seems to have worked so far.
O’Connor has already secured $2.5 million in funding for his cloud-based system that e-commerce companies can use to manage their outgoing packages. And he is on the hunt for more.
“We’ve taken on some internal money since our last round in 2014 from our existing investors, but since we’re a growing company I’m currently out looking and I will probably be raising for a long time,” he said.
“It’s not the easiest thing to do, but I came from a sales and marketing background and it is just another type of sale. When it comes to closing out the finer points, that’s where the challenge is.”
Although logistics may not carry the same tech-industry buzz as the likes of virtual reality, the Wexford-based company is making waves after closing a €6 million deal with Fastway that will see Scurri process €3.4 billion worth of goods for the courier’s 15,000 customers.
O’Connor told Fora the company would need further funding due to continue investing in research and development to improve its product. Company filings show the firm had accumulated losses of €1.9 million to the end of 2014.
Scurri founder Rory O'Connor
Bigger and better clients
The deal with Fastway also means Scurri is now working in Ireland with major online retailers such as ASOS, Littlewoods, MissGuided and Boohoo.
O’Connor said he found that once the first significant customer was on board, the rest had a habit of falling in line.
“The hardest bit is to get one big client. We started with very small customers and kept chipping away at it, then an opportunity came up to take on Zara as a client through Fastway in Ireland.
“Once we got that name on the CV, we just found that we got more and more of the large customers. We have a number of really exciting ones in the process of going live. We are just going through test phases.”
The names of those “really exciting” companies are under lock and key for now, but as far as O’Connor is concerned they are “household names”.
Scrap it and start again
On the face of it, Scurri’s rise to be a significant player in the UK and Irish delivery market appears steady, but O’Connor said it has not always been plain sailing.
The company went through a major overhaul in 2013 when the product simply wasn’t living up to expectations, he added.
“We have had our own failures. Our first iteration of the product didn’t really work and we had to do a major pivot. We just sat down, left our egos at the door and looked at the numbers which showed it didn’t work.”
After pouring three years of hard work into the product, O’Connor said it was a matter of salvaging what they could from everything they had worked on.
“We did lots of experiments to fix the problems we had and it didn’t work. So, it was time to see if there was anything in what we have that we can actually utilise. We had built a more consumer-facing model in the initial phase, but the technology was good and the core idea of making delivery simple was still sound.
“So we found there was more of a market mix in making it simple for e-commerce merchants and get to the consumer through them, rather than to do it directly for the consumer.”
Fastway is one of Scurri's biggest clients
Lady luck
O’Connor said one of the biggest lessons he had learned so far was to not “feel guilty if your first idea doesn’t work”.
“What you do then is what’s important. I know a lot of people who have been through two or three different things and never been successful … I’ve just been lucky.
“We hit things right and I’m sure there are people that are far more talented than me that have had a couple of failures and that hasn’t done them any harm.”
