Delhivery - A Startup That Became a Unicorn by Disrupting India’s Logistics Industry

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Logistics has always been an important sector for any country, including India, but the space had never seen such a ground-breaking turn before Delhivery came into being. Proving itself since 2011 as a great startup, this company is now a backbone for the logistics industry.

Delhivery is currently one of the leading players in the logistics space in the country. It offers a full suite of services such as last-mile delivery, third-party and transit warehousing, reverse logistics, payment collection, vendor-to-warehouse, vendor-to-customer shipping, and more.

Delhivery became a unicorn in 2019 when it raised $413 million in a Series F round led by SoftBank Vision Fund, Carlyle Group, and Fosun International. It was then valued at $1.5 billion. Delhivery has last been valued at $4.77 Billion in May 2022.

Read this article to know about Delhivery Company Profile, Founders, Business Model, How it Started, Growth, Competitors, Funding, and Investors.

Delhivery - Company Highlights

Delhivery - About and How it Works
Delhivery - Industry
Delhivery - Founders and Team
Delhivery - Startup Story
Delhivery - Name, Tagline, and Logo
Delhivery - Mission and Vision
Delhivery - Business Model and Revenue Model
Delhivery - Growth and Revenue
Delhivery - Funding and Investors
Delhivery - ESOPs
Delhivery - Partnerships
Delhivery - Competitors
Delhivery - Acquisitions
Delhivery - Future Plans

Delhivery - About and How it Works

Delhivery is a prominent courier services, logistics, and supply chain solutions company that enthusiastically works with individuals and businesses. Founded back in May 2011, Delhivery is headquartered in Gurugram, Haryana, India and provides a range of services, including last-mile delivery, third-party and transit warehousing, reverse logistics, payment collection, vendor-to-warehouse, vendor-to-customer shipping, and more.

The company is backed by Times Internet Ltd, which acquired a minority stake in the firm in June last year.

Having three responsibilities on its shoulders - fulfilment, omnichannel, and data services, the company’s focus is to deliver the best service without any waste of chances in solving the customers' problems.

It provides the products and services intended to build trust and improve the lives of consumers, small businesses, enterprises, and their growing teams of employees and partners. Delhivery is disrupting India’s logistics industry with the help of its proprietary network design, infrastructure, partnerships, engineering, and technological capabilities.

Delhivery brings unparalleled cost efficiency and pan-India reach to its 10,000+ customers. Driven by its mission to shrink time and distance, Delhivery aims to make the world a smaller place for its customers. Powered by an effective and streamlined business plan, Delhivery is emerging as one of the leading players in the supply chain and logistics space, so much so that it can be referred to as one of such courier and logistics startups that have paved a new path for the delivery of products. Besides, Delhivery is driven by a constant focus on their customers and serving them with quality products, thereby building confidence and trust for the brand.

Delhivery - Industry

The country's logistics industry, which is worth around $160 billion is likely to grow by an expected CAGR of 10% and touch $215 billion in the next two years with the implementation of GST. However, most of the industry was largely torn into unorganized players where the arrival of Delhivery can be simply termed as a phenomenon that has completely changed the industry and the way it works.

Here comes the biggest reach of Delhivery where they have over 1400 serviceable pin codes on their list and 19,990+ sq ft of warehouse space in Delhi as well as in Bangalore. Delivery has a lot of partners with whom it aims to increase the product reach and to cope with those partners, the company also offers third-party warehousing and transit warehousing.

Along with having numerous e-commerce brands like Flipkart, Amazon, eBay, Snapdeal, Jabong, and Healthkart, as its customers, Delhivery also manages its customer base that comprises many other businesses and individuals.

Delhivery - Founders and Team

Delhivery was started by a bunch of engineers - Bhavesh Manglani, Kapil Bharati, Mohit Tandon, Sahil Barua, and Suraj Saharan.

Sahil Barua

Another Bain & Company consultant Sahil Barua was a BE Mechanical Engineering student at NIT Karnataka. Sahil Barua, who currently serves as the Co-founder and CEO of Delhivery, completed his graduation and then went on to pursue a PGDM course at IIM Bangalore. Sahil finally decided to co-found Delhivery together with the other founders.

Kapil Bharati

Kapil Bharati is the Co-founder and CTO at Delhivery. He is an alumnus of IIT Delhi, from where he completed his Btech degree in Mechanical Engineering. Bharati served as the Technical Lead at Hindustan Times for livemint.com and the HT blogs and then joined SapientNitro as a Senior Manager of technology. Bharati had earlier co-founded two other companies - 11Rupees and Contify.com, before co-founding Delhivery.

Bhavesh Manglani

Bhavesh Manglani was another Co-founder of Delhivery, who left the company on March 29, 2021. Manglani was a PGDCM/MBA, Systems, Finance student at IIM Calcutta, which he completed after obtaining his BTech in Information and Communication Technology. Bhavesh has had earlier experience working as a Manager - Usage and revenue Enhancement, Prepaid Mobile, All India, and a Product Manager at Reliance Communications and Idea Cellular Ltd. before he co-founded Delhivery.

Mohit Tandon

Mohit Tandon is an IIT Kanpur alumnus and eventually joined Bain & Company after completing his graduation, where he served as a Consultant for around 5 years before co-founding Delhivery. Tandon had been a Co-founder of Delhivery, before he left the company on March 29, 2021.

Suraj Saharan

Suraj Saharan was also an ex-Bain & Company consultant, who started with ICICI Lombard as a Customer Service Manager and eventually co-founded Delhivery. Saharan is an IIT Bombay alumnus, from where he obtained a BTech degree in Mechanical Engineering. Saharan is also a co-founder of the company.

To increase the quality of the products delivered by Delhivery, Suvayu Ali (Data Scientist at Delhivery) kept a special check on the market of these technical matters with an algorithm, which is one of the projects that a team of data scientists at Delhivery, led by former entrepreneur and Facebook's data scientist Santanu Bhattacharya, is working on.

Delhivery currently boasts of a team that is 66000+ employees strong.

Delhivery - Startup Story

It was approximately half-past eleven at night when Suraj and Sahil ordered food from a nearby restaurant in Gurgaon. When they had the delivery man standing in front of their door, they got chatty with the delivery person, who spoke of the problem of unemployment that was about to break out. This made the founders rush down to the store and talk to the manager. Soon they were at the restaurant, talking to the owner, who further elaborated on his plans of closing down the business and moving his staff elsewhere. Here's where Sahil and Suraj decided to start their delivery business, Delhivery. Yes, they hired all of them!

Sahil narrated the exact conversation between him and the owner of the restaurant - “It was 11.30 at night, I still remember, we took our bikes and went to meet the owner, Anuj Bajaj, who was surprisingly still there. He said he was shutting the restaurant down. He was really happy we had come because he wanted his staff to relocate somewhere. We said bring it on, we’ll hire everybody."

Delhivery - Name, Tagline, and Logo

Delhivery has stuck with a simple but eye-catching logo where the name of the brand is displayed in black.

True to its tagline- 'Small world', Delhivery is changing the logistics market making the world smaller with its new strategy of delivering fast.

Delhivery - Mission and Vision

Delhivery's mission is to simplify the movement of goods. It aims to change the world, one shipment at a time.

The vision of the company is to "become the operating system for commerce in India, through a combination of world-class infrastructure, logistics operations of the highest quality and cutting-edge engineering and technology capabilities."

Delhivery - Business Model and Revenue Model

Delhivery has currently been hailed as India’s leading supply chain services company. It is one of India's largest B2B, B2C, and C2C Logistics Courier Service providers. The company is best known for the economical shipping rates that it charges for its services. Furthermore, Delhivery claims to have - No Setup Fees or Subscription Charges!

The services offered by Delhivery can be divided into 3 primary departments

1. Warehousing - Flexible warehousing across 40+ cities in India
2. Transportation - Largest pan-India reach across 19000+ pin codes and 2500+ cities
3. ECommerce - Ready integration with Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento & Opencart.

Delhivery - Growth and Revenue

Founded in Gurgaon, Delhivery was initially a small business with only 5 members in total for all their work, from accounts to product service to delivery hookups. However, within a short span of time, the company hired more than 15,000 people across a range of departments including deliverymen, account keepers, and many others, some of whom were solely dedicated to looking after customer satisfaction and managing deliveries along with providing extensive help and support with the customer issues.

Delhivery QoQ Financials

Delhivery, experienced a net loss of Rs 399.3 crore, which is a big increase of 208% compared to the same time last year in the first quarter of the financial year 2023 (Q1 FY23). The losses for Delhivery grew even more in the recent quarter, going up by 233% from the previous quarter and reaching Rs 119.8 crore. This means that the company faced challenges and its financial situation became tougher during these periods.

During the period ending in June 2023 (Q1FY24), the company achieved significant progress. Their revenue from operations reached Rs 1929.8 crore, marking an impressive growth of 10.55% when compared to the same quarter in the previous fiscal year (FY23), during which their revenue was Rs 1745.7 crore. This robust increase highlights the company's ability to generate more income and indicates positive strides in its business activities.

The growth of Delhivery has been documented up until the year 2023 are as follows:

•  Since its inception, the company has successfully shipped a remarkable 2.1               billion parcels.

•  Total of around 26.5k+ business are served.

•   It has covered 17 million+ square feet logistics.

•   Total of over 26,500 businesses have been served.

The growth highlights as posted by Delhivery in 2021 are as follows:

• The company boasts of a collection of 85+ packing warehouses in total across the country
• It has around 24 automated sort centres
• Delhivery has around 75+ hubs
• 7,500+ partner centres
• Around 50,000 employees

Furthermore, Delhivery claims to possess a capacity of processing more than 15 lakh (around 1.5 million) parcels per day in over 17,500 pin codes in India across 2,300 towns and cities.

All of these are possible mainly because of its network of nearly 7,000 drivers and over 5,000 trucks. Delhivery is also building some of the country's largest trucking terminals at key locations in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Kolkata, and Chennai.

The company culture aims at making every individual experience working in the trenches as a delivery boy, for at least twelve hours a week, to promote teamwork and efficiency of the employees.

In an interview, Sahil Barua quoted some wonderful lines for his employees “After every 20 minutes I get up and go talk to a team member. Thanks to this, I know everyone in our office by their first name. We have that kind of openness in the office where people can tell us what they think. That is what keeps us going”.

The Rise and Fall of the Delhivery Shares

Delhivery shares rose by 6.34% on June 2, 2022, which closed at INR 570. It reached INR 617.70 during this season, which was an all-time high intraday. This was reset again when Delhivery shares reached INR 683.35 on July 20, 2022. Among the new-age tech stocks, it was only Nykaa's shares, which rose by 1.05% to INR 1470.95. All the other stocks of Policy Bazaar, PB Fintech, Paytm and Zomato fell recently, as reported on June 3, 2022. Delhivery shares continued to hold its winning streak for the third season straight. The shares of Delhivery ended 6% and 4% higher on consecutive days to end at INR 699.95 on the BSE as per July 21, 2022 reports. With this, the market capitalisation of Delhivery crossed the INR 50,000 crore mark, which helped Delhivery be clubbed together in the house of the top 100 Indian companies with the highest market capitalisation.

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Delhivery has launched something big called 'Company One.' It's a super modern digital shipping platform made to help small businesses. This cool invention puts together lots of shipping services. It's not just about talking to customers after they buy things and using smart data, but also about easily sending things to other countries, quickly connecting to different places where they sell stuff, and handling reports about things that couldn't be delivered. All of this brings a totally new and really smart way of shipping and delivering things for these small businesses.

This new system will enable small businesses to ship their products without needing to meet a minimum order requirement. They can start shipping by adding a minimum of INR 500 to their wallet. With Delhivery One, small businesses can now ship their products to more than 220 countries. This is made possible through Delhivery's partnership with FedEx, a well-known logistics company. Delhivery is also working on making the digital platform even better. They are  planning to add new features like connecting to various online marketplaces and creating a mobile app called "Delhivery One",

Delhivery YoY Financials - Revenue, Expenditure and more

The company claims to have a turnover of Rs 3700 crore in FY21, which was recorded at Rs 2800 crore during FY2020 and has plans to reach Rs 6000 - Rs 7000 crore in the next two years. The operating revenue jumped from Rs 2780.5 crore (FY20) to Rs 3646 crore during FY21.

In the year 2023, the company did well and earned more money compared to the year before. Their income went up by 5%, going from Rs 6882 crore in the previous year (FY22) to Rs 7225 crore this year. But there's something to keep in mind: the amount of money they spent also went up. In the year before, they spent Rs 8064 crore, and now it's gone up to Rs 8597 crore. This means their expenses went up by about 6.6% from the previous year (FY22).

A 8% year-over-year (y-o-y) increase from Rs 1,796 crore in Q2 FY23 to Rs 1,942 crore in Q2 FY24 was reported by Delhivery Limited as revenue from services. Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, or adjusted EBITDA, lost Rs 125 crore in Q2 FY23 but Rs 13 crore in Q2 FY24, a 90% year-over-year decrease. The loss after tax decreased by 59% year over year to Rs 103 crore in Q2 FY24 from Rs 254 crore in Q2 FY23 over the same period.

Delhivery - Funding and Investors

Delhivery has raised a total of $1.69B in funding over 15 rounds. The company raised a funding round worth $303.73 mn (Rs 2347 cr) led by 64 anchor investors including Stead view, Tiger Global, Bay Capital and more, prior to its IPO on May 11, 2022. As per the company filings, Delhivery allotted 48 mn shares to the anchor investors at Rs 487 each.

The previous round of the company came in on September 24, 2021, led by Addition. This has helped it raise around $125 million. The company also witnessed funds equal to Rs 558 crore ($76.34 million) in the previous round dated September 6, 2021. The Series I round of funding was also led by Lee Fixel's Addition LLC. Delhivery is currently valued at $4.77 bn, as of May 2022.

Here is a list of all the funding rounds of Delhivery:

The logistics giant has allotted 146,961 Series I Compulsory Convertible Preference shares (CCPS) to Addition LLC valued at Rs 37, 900 per share, according to the MCA filings of the brand as of September 6, 2021.

Delhivery IPO

Delhivery eyed an IPO round of around $1 billion and filed its Draft Red Herring Prospectus on October 7, 2021. The company had already received approval from its shareholders to turn into a public entity by then, and soon afterwards, it was converted from Delhivery Private Limited to Delhivery Limited. Delhivery, which earlier anticipated raising a total of Rs 7460 crore in its upcoming IPO, has eventually decided to reduce its IPO size to Rs 5500 crore, which is a 26.27% less than what the company proposed earlier. This reduction in Delhivery's IPO size has been fueled by market volatility and the current geopolitical situation. On a sitting with the Board of Delhivery, the company has decided to open its IPO after the closure of the LIC IPO, the subscription window of which is closing on May 9th, 2022. This has been later postponed to 11 May 2022, when Delhivery would be opening its Rs 5235 crore public issue. The valuation that Delhivery would be targeting with its IPO was mentioned somewhere around $5 bn, as per the reports dated May 5, 2022.

The Delhivery IPO which was expected to be opening on May 11, 2022, was anticipated to be sold at a price band of Rs 462-487 per share. After this listing, now Delhivery is listed on BSE and NSE and has joined the league of companies like TCI Express, Bluedart, and Mahindra Logistics. Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, BofA Securities, and Kotak Mahindra Capital were some of the book-running lead managers to the Delhivery IPO.

Delhivery opened its IPO on May 11th, 2022, which opened to a customary start where the total subscriptions hovered at 4%. While the retail subscription was subscribed to 23%, the employee share quota was at 4% subscriptions after 2 hours of the Delhivery listing. What can be called a lukewarm start, the Delhivery IPO seemed to lack market liquidity, coming just after LIC's mega IPO round, which closed on May 9, 2022. Delhivery witnessed a tepid response on its first day of IPO with 21% overall subscriptions. At the close of the day, the retail portion was subscribed 30% while the portion of the Qualified Institutional Investors (QII) followed in with around 29% subscriptions. The employee's quota of Delhivery was subscribed to around 6% while that of the Non-Institutional Buyers (NIB) remained subscribed at 1% only.  

The day 2 subscriptions were underwhelming too for Delhivery, the shares of which were subscribed to only 23%, with a 2% increase from what it was at the end of Day 1. At the end of Day 2, the retail portion remained the highest subscribed, which saw 40% subscriptions, while the subscription for the QII portion was unchanged, at 29%. The subscription for the NIB portion, however, saw an increase in subscriptions, which became 12%.  

The Delhivery shares were listed at Rs 493 per share, which was 1.2% higher than their issue price, Rs 487, on the BSE, whereas on the NSE, the Delhivery shares were listed at 1.7% higher than the issue price, at Rs 495.2. However, the shares continued gaining on a listing day to stand at Rs 537.25, which is 9% higher at the closing on the BSE and stood 10.1% higher at Rs 536.25 on the NSE. The Delhivery stocks were listed on May 24, 2022, on the BSE and NSE, and the very next, it was found that the shares by 4.73% to Rs 511 on NSE. The valuation of Delhivery, which was previously valued at Rs 35,283 crore ($4.55 bn) before its IPO, stood at Rs 37,022 crore ($4.77 bn) at the end of the listing day.

With the listing of its shares on May 24, 2022, Delhivery turned out as the first tech startup to go public in the season where negative sentiment is dominating the public listing. However, the Delhivery IPO turned out to be a money-making event for its big investors. Softbank, which entered the cap table of Delhivery in 2019, had 14,15,93,300 shares, out of which the Japanese company sold 7,494,867 equity shares or 5% stakes and received over 148% ROI. On the other hand, Times Internet, which was one of the early backers of the company, held 4.92% stakes in the firm and sold shares worth $21 mn in the Delhivery IPO, thereby gaining 139X returns.  

Delhivery - ESOPs

The company initially decided to expand its employee stock option plans (ESOP) pool that will be overlooking its $1 Bn-IPO, when it allotted 11,614 shares valued at $126.6K to its employees in 2019. The IPO value was later reduced to ($677.81 mn) Rs 5235 crore. It then allotted 9,545 shares (Rs 2,895 each) valued at Rs 2.84 cr to 12 of its employees. This was decided via an extraordinary general meeting (EGM) on September 29, 2021.

Delhivery announced the allotment of ESOPs worth Rs 43.6 crore to around 66 employees as soon as it filed its DRHP for its first IPO, as per November 2021 reports. According to the company filings, Delhivery declared the allotment of 12,17,500 equity shares to over more than 5 dozen employees on the exercise of their stock options.

Delhivery presented 9 items that included ESOP 2012, Delhivery ESOP II 2020, Delhivery ESOP III 2020, Delhivery ESOP IV 2021, Article of Associations, and other allied schemes for voting in front of its stakeholders. Interestingly, the institutional shareholders (72% of them) have largely voted against these ESOP schemes, as per reports dated July 18, 2022. However, the ESOP schemes were still passed with the votes of the non-public institutions and promoters in the company meeting.  The presentation of the ESOP schemes of Delhivery was in line with the SEBI policy, which does not allow listed companies to make any fresh grant related to the transferring of shares to their employees if the Pre-IPO ESOP schemes are not approved by the shareholders.

Delhivery - Partnerships

Delhivery partnered with many organizations thus far. Among its prominent partnerships include its collaboration with Volvo in August 2020 with an aim to add tractor-trailers into its express network.

"This is the first major deployment of tractor-trailers in express trucking which is a significant step for Delhivery towards getting ready for the future and towards expanding our network and building our leadership position in this market further," said Sahil Barua, Co-Founder, Delhivery.

The company has also partnered with FedEx Express for a strategic alliance transaction, which was earlier signed in the month of July and completed on December 9, 2021. This transaction is deemed to combine the extensive pan-India network and technology solutions of Delhivery with the global network that FedEx boasts of. This will help the customers get the best of both worlds together.

Delhivery - Competitors

As Delhivery is a logistics company, and obviously, Delhivery thrives amidst huge market competition from some of the companies like:

• Ecom Express
• DotZot
• FSC (Future Supply Chain)
• BlackBuck
• Delex
• Delivery.com
• Ekart Logistics
• Shadowfax

It is because of the competition in the market that customers get different choices, and all of them more or less closely match each other when it comes to quality.

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Delhivery - Acquisitions

The company has acquired 3 startups as of December 8, 2021. The latest acquisition came in on December 8, 2021, when Delhivery acquired Transition Robotics, a California-based startup that is currently focussing on the development of the Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) platforms, founded by Jeff Gibboney in 2011. This will give the supply chain services unicorn an opportunity to be directly involved with the core drone technology, the "regulations and use cases" of which, "are evolving in the country", CTO Kapil Bharati said.

Delhivery, which is eyeing the filing of its Draft Red Herring Prospectus (DRHP), has already issued bonus shares to shareholders. The logistics and supply chain startup held an extraordinary general meeting (EGM) on September 29, where it has announced that it would allot fully paid up 1.68 Cr bonus shares worth INR 10, to equity shareholders. This will be in the ratio of 9:1.

The logistics unicorn has allotted 1,68,46,803 shares of Rs 10 each, which increased the total number of shares from 18,71,868 to 1,87,18,670 bonus shares. These shares would be allotted to 90 existing equity shareholders of the company, as per the reports dated October 4, 2021.

The company has allotted 12.29 Lakh bonus shares, where the Founder of the company, Sahil Barua boasts of having the highest shares when it comes to the founders of the startup. Times Internet and CPPIB are the other prominent shareholders, which were allotted 28.53 Lakh and 23.80 Lakh shares respectively, which are the highest that the investors of the company got.

Delhivery - Future Plans

Delhivery is currently all set to launch its first IPO on May 11, 2022, and with a successful listing on BSE and NSE markets, it would join the likes of Flipkart-led BlueDart and others. Also, Delhivery will continue to aggressively invest in building trucking infrastructure and is planning to invest up to Rs 300 crore in the next 24 months to expand its fleet size. The company will plan its IPO soon, which would be valued at $1 billion, according to the reports dated August 25, 2021.

The company claims to have a turnover of Rs 2800 crore for FY2020 and has plans to reach Rs 6000 - Rs 7000 crore in the next two years.

“Two years ago, when we were trying to go public, it so happened that the timing of our decision to go public coincided with the Indian general elections, and it was probably not the best time to go public because a lot of focus was going to be on elections…plus, there was already a private capital pool that was available, so we basically, pushed it back. Our view is that in the next 12-18 months, we see us going back into the public market," Says  Sandeep Barasia, Chief Business Officer, Delhivery

FAQs

Who are the Founders/Owners of Delhivery?

Delhivery was founded by Bhavesh Manglani, Kapil Bharati, Mohit Tandon, Sahil Barua, and Suraj Saharan.

Which is the Parent Company of Delhivery?

Delhivery Pvt Ltd. is the company that owns Delhivery.

What is Delhivery courier service?

Delhivery offers a full suite of services such as last-mile delivery, third-party and transit warehousing, reverse logistics, payment collection, vendor-to-warehouse, vendor-to-customer shipping, and more

Who is the CEO of Delhivery?

Sahil Barua is the Founder and CEO of Delhivery.

Who are the Top Competitors of Delhivery?

As Delhivery is a logistics company, it is obvious to have great competition in the market. Some of the very state rivals are:

• Ecom Express
• DotZot
• FSC (Future Supply Chain)
• BlackBuck
• Delex
• Delivery.com

How can you use Delhivery tracking?

You can easily use the Delhivery tracking facility by simply visiting the Delhivery homepage and the "Track your order" section in it, where you need to type Mobile Number/Tracking ID/Order No./Reference No./LTI Shipment (LRN No.) to get your order tracked effectively.

What are Delhivery courier service charges?

The Delhivery courier service charges are based on the weight of the order or parcel.

What is the Delhivery company turnover?

If you are wondering about Delhivery revenue, then the Delhivery company turnover is $464.03 mn (INR 3500 crore in FY2021).