The story
Founded in 1996, Stamps.com was created under the name StampMaster by Jim McDermott, Ari Engelberg, and Jeff Green, who at the time were MBA graduate students at UCLA. StampMaster was among the first companies to obtain approval from the United States Postal Service for beta testing and introducing Internet postage to the market. The Postal Service began announcing proposals for digital delivery of postage in 1996.
Stamps.com finished its Series A funding in February 1998 with $1.5 million. Series B funding followed in August 1998 with $4.52 million. It had its last round of private financing in February 1999, generating an additional $30 million from investors including former Postmaster General, Marvin Runyon. The company went public in June of the same year and raised $55 million in its IPO. Less than six months after its IPO, the company had its secondary public offering. In August 1999, the Postal Service granted permission for Stamps.com to sell its service nationally. Stamps.com purchased IShip.com, a company that compared prices of shipping services, for $305 million in stock or eight million shares, in October 1999.
In 2001, Stamps.com named Ken McBride its CEO. The U.S. Postal Service authorized the first market test of PhotoStamps in 2004. In 2005, the company reported $10.4 million in net income. PhotoStamps was re-launched in May 2005 for another year-long test run. The United States Congress amended a law in January 2006 that had prohibited attaching business advertising to postage, effective in May of that year, which cleared the way for businesses to use PhotoStamps. In September 2006, the company launched Photo NetStamps, which combined its previous NetStamps product with PhotoStamps. This combination allowed PhotoStamps to be used with exact postage printed from Stamps.com software. By 2008, Stamps.com had more than 300,000 customers. The company recorded revenues of $38.6 million in 2012.
By 2013, it had approximately 465,000 registered customers. Stamps.com reported $147.3 million in revenue the following year. It acquired Auctane ShipStation, a web-based multi-carrier shipping vendor based in Austin, Texas, in June 2014 for $50 million and up to 768,900 shares of stock. Auctane LLC, which used the trade name ShipStation, was founded in 2011 and creates tools to import orders from shopping cart platforms for order fulfillment. The acquisition made Auctane an independent subsidiary of Stamps.com operated by its existing management team. In October that same year, Stamps.com acquired ShipWorks, a multi-carrier shipping software company that integrates with shopping cart platforms, for $22 million. ShipWorks continued to operate as an independent, wholly owned subsidiary of Auctane.
In March 2015, Stamps.com entered into an agreement to acquire Endicia, another internet postage company, from Newell Rubbermaid for approximately $215 million. Endicia's products include the DYMO Stamps and PictureItPostage brands.
On June 20, 2016, Stamps.com announced that it had entered into a definitive agreement to purchase ShippingEasy, Inc., an Austin, Texas-based company which offers web-based multi-carrier shipping software that allows online retailers and e-commerce merchants to organize, process, fulfill and ship their orders. Stamps.com agreed to acquire ShippingEasy for $55 million in cash, as well as performance-linked equity awards of 87,000 shares of Stamps.com's common stock.
On July 25, 2018, Stamps.com announced another agreement to purchase Metapack Ltd., a London-based company providing delivery management technology to e-commerce retailers and brands. The agreement was made on the price of approx. £175 million in cash. MetaPack continued to operate as a wholly owned subsidiary led by its current management.
On July 9, 2021, Thoma Bravo announced a pending acquisition of Stamps.com at a $330/share price, and a 40-day "go-shop" period for alternative proposals. The acquisition was completed in October of that year, and in December the company changed its corporate name to Auctane, previously the name of its subsidiary that owned ShipStation, ShippingEasy, ShipEngine, and ShipWorks. Thoma Bravo announced that it would merge Auctane and WWEX Group, a third-party logistics company, after acquiring the latter in March 2026. According to WWEX, the merger would create "the most comprehensive, AI-enabled end-to-end logistics platform in the market".
From Wikipedia’s article on Stamps.com, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.7