After the ecommerce boom, allied services were destined to rake in big bucks as investors continue to back ventures which provide services to online retail companies. Ecom Express, a logistics solution provider has raised a hefty amount of $133 Mn (INR 850 Cr) from an affiliate of global private equity firm Warburg Pincus. The logistics company caters to more than 2800 pin code with its 320 delivery centres and 8000 employees in 210 cities.
Ecom express was founded in 2012 by Krishnan, Sanjeev Saxena, K. Satyanarayana and Manju Dhawan, all of whom have deep expertise in courier and logistics industry. The company also raised about $16 Mn (INR 100 Cr) in funding in September last year.
The company plans to use the said funds to expand its delivery footprint in tier 3 and 4 towns and cities along with plans to invest further in technology and strengthen network reliability and infrastructure.
TA Krishnan, Chief Executive, Ecom Express said,” These initiatives will help us deliver superior customer experience and build a scalable business. We look forward to leveraging Warburg Pincus’ domain expertise in logistics and the firm’s global network of relationships.”
Viraj Sawhney, Managing Director at Warburg Pincus emphasized that there is a need for logistics capacity in India to serve the requirements of the ecommerce industry and businesses are seeking reliable service providers who can scale up with them.
Ecommerce is expanding at light speed and to have a sustainable growth in the same, it is of utmost importance that backbone of ecommerce, i.e. Logistics should catch up its pace. Following this expansion, the logistics segment has advocated various fundings and a lot of innovation. Flipkart tying up with Mumbai’s Dabbawalas for last mile delivery. This segment has turned so important that ecommerce giant Amazon set up its own logistics arm in India to speed up its delivery process and even Snapdeal acquired a stake in GoJavas and also there were reports that it has invested over $4Mn (INR25 Cr.) in its wholly owned logistics unit, Vulcan Express Pvt. Ltd.
Delhivery, ecommerce fulfilment company raised its Series D round of $85 Mn last month which was led by Tiger Global Management with participation from existing investors, Multiples Alternate Asset Management, Nexus Venture Partners, and Times Internet Limited. Mumbai-based logistics analytics startup, LogiNext Solutions, that offers advanced analytics to improve logistics and supply chain in an organisation raised seed funding of about $460K (INR 3 Cr) from Indian Angel Network (IAN). Last year, Holisol logistics, a back-end logistic provider to ecommerce players had raised $1.5 Mn in its first venture capital funding led by oil and gas professional Sundeep Bhandari. On the other side, Gati Limited had announced its plans to raise over INR 120 Cr.
Currently, India’s ecommerce sector is estimated at $3 Bn and is only about 1% of overall retail segment, it is expected that it will touch $43 Bn by 2019 which calculates to 14 fold growth in a span of 4 years.
The development was reported by ET.
