Delhivery Hikes Investment In Parcelled

Tiger Global-backed e-commerce logistics major Delhivery is leading a Series A round in on-demand delivery company Parcelled, after having seeded the startup earlier this year. This comes on the back of Delhivery’s investment in Bangalore-based hyperlocal delivery player Opinio, indicating the logistics firm’s strategy to expand its platform by picking up stakes in smaller ventures.

Delhivery, which is focused on catering to e-commerce clients, has been adding express and hyperlocal offerings as it gets challenged by these younger set of logistics tech startups. Parcelled received around $5 million from Delhivery & Tracxn Labs, while Opinio had bagged $7 million in funding from Delhivery, Sands Capital and Accel Partners recently.

Sahil Barua, co-founder, Delhivery, told TOI, “The companies we have backed are solving crucial problems in the first mile and last mile legs of delivery. They make it easier to return parcels to e-commerce companies, provide immediate delivery options across categories from local retailers and enable a larger pool of people from the informal economy to participate in our fulfillment and delivery operations.”

In the past year, a new wave of logistics technology startups has mushroomed, with the bulk of them in the express, hyperlocal space.

Founded earlier this year by ex-Flipkart employees Xitij Kothi, Rikin Kachhia, Abhishek Srivastava and Nikhil Bansal, Parcelled will use the fresh capital to strengthen its technology to reduce costs and expand to 50 cities across the country.

“We will focus on building robust allocation and routing algorithms, image recognition, data collection and other such technologies to reduce bottlenecks in the first mile,” Kothi said. Modelled on the likes of Shyp in the US, Parcelled targets consumers, small marketplace sellers and small- and medium-sized businesses who want to ship items on-demand. It claims to have touched 10,000 orders per day.

“Parcelled is solving a fundamental consumer problem of being able to ship from anywhere in a frictionless manner. Backed by the size of our network, it would allow consumers to ship from anywhere to anywhere at the press of a button,” Delhivery’s Barua said. Currently, Parcelled uses Delhivery as well as other courier partners for fulfilling deliveries.

The Gurgaon-based SSN Logistics runs Delhivery and has scooped up around $127 million from investors like Nexus Venture Partners, Tiger Global, Multiples, Times Internet, a part of Times Group which publishes this newspaper. It is currently valued at $350 million. Barua said they’ve hit $130 million in revenue run rate and are already providing hyperlocal delivery services in Delhi, Bangalore and Hyderabad and will expand further.

“We will continue to look for strategic partnerships and will continue to work with and support new ventures in the hyperlocal delivery segment. With our network and the scale of our operations, we believe we can immediately improve the unit economics of our partners in hyperlocal delivery,” Barua said.