Laura Wu

Laura Behrens Wu is the co-founder and CEO of Shippo, a multi-carrier shipping API and platform for e-commerce businesses that she started in 2013 with co-founder Simon Kreuz. She grew up in Germany (with a German father and Taiwanese mother) and spent part of her childhood in China. She graduated from the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland and moved to San Francisco after landing an internship at the fintech startup LendUp, a connection she made by networking at a Y Combinator event in Zurich.

After their internships, Behrens Wu and Kreuz launched an online store together. When they found managing shipping to be one of the few remaining pain points in running an e-commerce business — even after tools like Stripe simplified payments and Shopify streamlined storefronts — they pivoted to build Shippo to solve it. The company provides shipping-label generation, address validation, multi-carrier support, and discounted rates, integrating with platforms including Shopify, eBay, and Amazon.

Under her leadership, Shippo has raised roughly $154 million in total financing, including a $50 million Series E led by Bessemer Venture Partners that pushed the company past a $1 billion valuation. Other backers include Uncork Capital and Union Square Ventures, and the company serves well over 100,000 merchants. Behrens Wu and Kreuz were both named to Forbes' 2017 30 Under 30 Enterprise Technology list, and she was recognized on Inc.'s 2021 Female Founders 100 list.

Alongside running Shippo, Behrens Wu is an active seed-stage angel investor. She participated in Spearhead, a program designed to train founders to invest effectively, and has personally backed a range of early-stage startups. On her personal site she describes working "at the intersection of bytes and atoms."

• Invests as an individual angel at the seed / earliest stages, typically writing personal angel-sized checks.
• Focus areas skew toward enterprise software, e-commerce and retail infrastructure, logistics, fintech, and digital health, reflecting her operating expertise — with some crypto/web3 exposure (e.g., Optimism).
• Backs founders solving unglamorous, infrastructural problems — mirroring Shippo's own thesis of fixing an overlooked but essential layer of e-commerce (shipping), the way Stripe did for payments.
• Went through Spearhead, signaling a deliberate, learn-by-doing approach to angel investing rather than passive check-writing.
• Candid about risk: her own site notes she has invested in "many more startups that failed," underscoring a portfolio-style, high-risk seed mindset.