Capital+ Movement of Physical Things

Volition Capital invests in companies that are disrupting the way that physical things are being moved. This can be applied to almost every category, such as groceries, waste (RTS), bulk items, alcohol, even people! You may not think of people as physical things, but our movement has fundamentally changed from 10 years ago with the rise of ride-hailing services, micro-mobility scooters, and electric bikes (Super73).

Multiple underlying secular trends have enabled the technology transformation for the movement of physical things to enable one of our favorite value propositions: bringing legacy offline processes online.  While this may seem like a simple value prop, internet-enabled solutions have seen rapid adoption and are outpacing the growth of offline, legacy solutions. For example, online food delivery is driving most of the growth in the food delivery market and is projected to reach 73% of the total food delivery market share by 2022. In addition, the global alcohol e-commerce market is expected to exceed $40 billion by 2024, after just $3 billion in 2019 and $5.6B in 2021.

Attributes of offline, legacy solutions make numerous vertical markets ripe for technology disruption. A huge area of opportunity is industries in which these players are large and do not feel the pressure to innovate due to their traditional dominance, but there is often a variety of legacy company attributes that allow disruptors to establish themselves. Some of these attributes include:

The pandemic has accelerated the need for digitization of the movement of physical things. At the beginning of the pandemic, the US saw ten years of e-commerce growth in just three months. There is a growing need for supply chain infrastructure to meet the needs of this type of growth with advancements in shipping speeds, warehousing, and last mile delivery. Outside of the supply chain, there are still many vertical categories that have yet to be disrupted by technology in multi-billion-dollar market opportunities. We would welcome the opportunity to meet founders tackling all angles of this broad category.

Volition’s existing portfolio experience and knowledge allow us to work closely with companies in this sector while being a value-added partner. As early investors in Recycle Track Systems (RTS), our thesis was predominantly derived from low-tech competitors having little to no service orientation. Our thesis was similar to GlobalTranz, which brought transparency in pricing through moving an offline freight brokerage process online for LTL shipments. Furthermore, Tracelink is providing visibility and transparency to the opaque pharmaceutical supply chain. We are excited to take our expertise in scaling internet businesses to $1 billion+ in revenue, combine it with our heritage in software investing, and partner with founders that are leading the digitization of the movement of physical things.