Zimi: Fulfillment by Amazon for exporters in emerging markets

🛎TLDR: We’re bringing Amazon-prime-like fulfillment to exporters in emerging markets - making it easy, fast, and cheap for these businesses to sell internationally.

For example: Businesses selling with Zimi can deliver parcels to their international buyers for as little as ~$10 (instead of $80) and in just 2 days time.

❌ Problem

Cross-border e-commerce is projected to reach $2 trillion in merchandise value by 2030, with 64% of this opportunity coming from emerging markets. However, merchants in these regions face significant obstacles:

• High shopping costs often exceed 100% of order value

  

• Lengthy delivery times of 2 weeks or longer

• Costly cross-border return processes are a major financial drain

• Complex and time-consuming logistics management (customs/duties, paperwork, tracking)

These challenges result in an estimated $50 billion annual loss for African businesses alone, with similar figures in Latin America and South Asia.

📦 Solution

Zimi makes selling globally as easy, affordable, and simple as selling locally by optimizing cross-border logistics:

• Cheap and Faster Shipping: We enable 2-day delivery at up to 80% less than current shipping costs by localizing inventory
• Simplified Returns: We take the headache out of international returns, managing the entire process to reduce costs and improve customer satisfaction, saving businesses thousands of dollars.
• Streamlined Cross-Border Operations: Zimi handles the complexities of international shipping, customs clearance, warehousing, and last-mile delivery, freeing merchants to focus on growing their business instead of logistics

Zimi’s first customer sold $25K in merchandise within 48 hours of announcing 65% cheaper shipping costs and fast delivery timelines with Zimi. We’re on track to unlock millions in revenue for businesses across India and Nigeria - our first two key export markets.

🧑🏾‍💼👩🏾‍💼About Us

We’re Peter and Audrey. We met while completing our respective graduate school programs in CS and an MBA at Stanford.

• Peter is a second-time founder with experience in cross-border freight, SMB payments, and building commerce products as a project tech lead at Shopify
• Audrey is a product leader, having scaled e-comm businesses like Peloton internationally and developed fintech solutions to enable commerce in emerging markets.

Zimi is named after Audrey’s great-grandmother, a quick-witted entrepreneur who successfully kept food on the table as a single mom through her export business. With Zimi, we’re creating opportunities for hustlers like Audrey’s great-grandmother by making global commerce more accessible to everyone.

🙏Our Ask

If you know any businesses in South Asia, Latin America, or Africa that are selling to North America and/or Europe, please let us know (audrey@withzimi.com) or schedule some time with us here.