This tiny startup thinks it can challenge Costco and Walmart with just $6.5M and an app

Boxed, an e-commerce company that offers Costco-like discounts on macro-sized quantities of bulk items, is expanding.

The company announced today that it has raised $6.5 million in a Series A round of funding, led by Greycroft Partners.

Boxed doesn’t have quite the selection that Costco has, with just 800 products available to purchase. What it does offer is the convenience of shopping at home instead of wandering through the desolate caverns of a poorly lit tilt-up concrete warehouse. It also offers free shipping on all of its products, including dog food, peanut butter, coffee, and bulk packs of Clif Bars.

The company doesn’t run an e-commerce web site; you have to install its app, for Android or iOS, in order to shop on Boxed. It currently ships anywhere in the continental U.S.

Founder and CEO Chieh Huang is a former director at Zynga.

VentureBeat spoke with Huang when the company launched in August, 2013. At the time, he said that the app is built to take advantage of the way people actually shop on their phones.

“When you go on Amazon, it just shows you a wall of stuff. If companies do something like that on mobile, they’re going to lose customers right away. People don’t want to scroll through lots of items while on their phones,” Huang said.

In addition to Greycroft, investors joining the funding include ENIAC Ventures, Social Starts, BoxGroup, Owen Van Natta (a former Facebook executive), and David Ko (a former Zynga executive).