Why we built Shipherd.

We didn’t build Shipherd because we needed it ourselves. We built it because I spent a decade watching other people need it and never get it.

Hi, I’m Monish, one of the two founders here. Before this I ran UK logistics at Amazon.

People ask me where the idea for Shipherd came from, and I’d like to be able to point to the moment it all became clear. There wasn’t one. What there was instead was a decade of noticing the same thing over and over until I couldn’t ignore it any more.

At Amazon we were moving around a billion orders a year, and at that volume nothing stays hidden for long. You can see exactly where money leaks out of a fulfilment operation, because it leaks in the same places every time. Refunds get issued to customers and the reimbursement never arrives. Carrier invoices come in with errors that nobody has the hours to check line by line. Support tickets sit in the queue because answering one properly means opening four different systems.

We could afford to deal with all of that. I had teams and tooling and analysts whose entire job was to find it. Most businesses have nothing of the sort, and I don’t think I fully appreciated what that meant until I left.

At Gelato I was running logistics across more than thirty countries, and I found the same gaps in every one of them. The causes were identical and so was the money walking out of the door. The only real difference was that there were far fewer people available to do anything about it.

That is the part that stayed with me. The businesses losing the most, proportionally, are the ones with the least capacity to chase any of it back. Think of a retailer turning over a few million across Amazon, eBay, their own site and TikTok Shop, run by three people who are already at capacity. Chasing a forty-pound carrier claim takes twenty minutes of somebody’s day, so it never gets done, and in most cases it hasn’t been done for years.

If that sounds like your business, you already know what I’m describing.

I kept talking to Jai about all of this. We met at business school in Manchester and stayed friends through fifteen years of very different careers. He had been at BT before joining Zoom in the middle of the pandemic, when the entire world arrived at once and nothing had been built to handle that kind of load. He spent the next few years building the software that other companies use to look after their customers.

He was describing the same problem I was, from the other side of it. What I saw as money leaving a business, he saw as customers leaving one, and it turns out they are usually the same event. A parcel arrives late, and that single failure becomes a carrier claim that nobody files, a support ticket that somebody has to answer, and a customer quietly deciding not to order again. Three departments end up dealing with three consequences, using three tools that have never been introduced to each other.

So we spent a while looking at what was being built with AI for this market, and almost all of it fell into one of three camps. Some was made for enterprise buyers and priced accordingly. Some was built entirely around Shopify, which is fine if Shopify happens to be your whole business. The rest were narrow features being sold as products, destined to join the eleven other tools you already own that don’t speak to each other. Nobody was building for the businesses in the middle, which are the ones that need it most.

We both left good jobs in the same year to fix that. Shipherd does the checking, files the claims and handles what it can in your inbox, so that the money finds its way back to you without anybody having to find the hours.

We are on the side of fast-growing multi-channel retailers, because as far as I can tell nobody else is.

Thanks for reading. If you have questions about any of this, email me directly at [email protected]. I read everything, and I answer.

Monish Malik, [email protected]

Co-founder & CEO

Shipherd is backed by Q Ventures and ElevenLabs Grants.