Cross-border trade could be getting a lot more tricky with the wave of new tariffs getting introduced across different markets. Today in a timely piece of news, a London-founded startup called Swap — which is building tools for e-commerce companies to better navigate the cross-border trading world — is announcing $40 million in funding to expand.

ICONIQ Growth is leading the Series B, with participation also from Cherry Ventures, QED Investors, Portfolio Ventures, and 9900 Capital. The funding will be used to build on the company’s existing footprint with U.K. businesses, with an expansion plan into wider Europe and the U.S., as well as Australia and Canada. 

The funding is coming with some business momentum. Swap has to date racked up some 500 brands as customers. Swap has been winning that business with a platform that gives its users a single place to manage logistics and shipping operations, including inventory, returns and product recycling — functions that typically get handled — or mishandled — in a much more fragmented way. 

Its initial traction has been in the fashion, and in the future it’s planning to build software catering to the specific needs of other segments such as beauty, home goods and consumer tech.

Sam Atkinson, the CEO of Swap, said he and his co-founder and Zach Bailet came to the idea of building Swap on the heels of their own experiences in the world of online commerce. Previously, the pair had started their own business sourcing hand-made goods from Africa, importing them to the U.K. and then shipping them out to buyers globally. Their direct-to-consumer brand was called Slow Goods.

“As you can imagine, the logistics were pretty tough,” Atkinson said. “We were buying stuff from Burkina Faso, beautiful hand made shawls, rugs, and lampshades, bringing them to the U.K. and then fulfilling orders from here.”

Over 18 months, as the business grew, it just became more complicated to run it, he said. 

“We couldn’t make it work,” he said. “But we learned an awful lot about what it takes to get an e-commerce business off the ground, and the challenges of importing goods and shipping them out.” 

The pair took that experience and filed it away and went on to take consulting jobs respectively at McKinsey and Deloitte, and then Atkinson spent some time at the fintech Juni as head of strategy. The two knew they wanted to work together again and build something. Now, armed with a lot more experience on building technology for businesses, revisiting their own experiences and working to fix them was the challenge they wanted to tackle. 

Interestingly, while the founders knew pain points first-hand and had a vision for how to fix them, neither comes from a technical background. Atkinson said that the tech backend is developed by a team in Israel led by Oron Bendavid, the startup’s VP of engineering, with another engineering team set up in The Netherlands. 

Swap cites research that forecasts that the global cross-border market is due to be worth $7.9 trillion by 2030. If this plays out, that speaks to a huge opportunity for companies like Swap (and others in the same space, such as Shopify) to target smaller businesses that want to tap the internet to sell to more people, but might want to avoid, or at least diversify from, leaning on third parties like Amazon to do that. 

With the market already pushing $1 trillion in size, what this also means is that, when and if tariffs do come into effect, they are likely to drive even more efforts to build in efficiency to reduce the costs of associated with sending items around the world, said Seth Pierrepont, who led the investment for ICONIQ Growth. 

“You don’t have to look very far to see to see headlines that [point to] increased protectionism. It’s a very dynamic tariff environment, obviously,” he said. “Cross border supply chains and commerce were already complex, and now we’re adding to that. We think software providers are really well positioned to alleviate a lot of those headaches.” 

He said that he really bought into the idea of a single vendor providing multiple logistics tools for another reason: data. 

“Having all of those solutions in a single platform gives you unified data, which just enables more sophisticated operational insights over time, which allows you to do more interesting things. And, you know, the company has been growing incredibly fast.”