First Mile Logistics Services Provider, Parcelled, Gets $5 Mn Series A From Delhivery

Apart from the investments of Angels and VC, it is raining funds for the logistics startups as matured startups are investing in the new-age ones, ecommerce companies and others, also started showing interest in the same. Gurgaon based logistics startup, Delhivery and Tracxn Labs, has invested over $5 Mn in logistics services startup Parcelled.

It is Delhivery and Tracxn Labs’ second investment in the startup, and had also participated in the seed round.

This announcement came within two weeks after Delhivery, Sands Capital and Accel Partners invested $7 Mn in Opinio, another Bangalore-based B2B hyperlocal delivery startup. Earlier, Snapdeal had also hiked its investment in Gojavas with additional $20 Mn.

This is a Series A round for Parcelled, the funds raised in this round will be to invested in technology and expand to 50 cities. It was started in March 2015 by ex-Flipkart employees Xitij Kothi, Rikin Kachhia, Abhishek Srivastava and Nikhil Bansal. It is an online courier service, providing on-demand home pick and drop courier service. The Parcelled representatives reach at the pick up location with packing material, and proceed forward for delivery. Parcelled, currently, operates in 8 cities including Delhi, Bangalore, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata. It has also tied up with Delhivery, Fedex, DRL, Bluedart and DHL for courier services. From managing 1000 orders a day, with a fleet of 150 people on ground, in July, it claims to have now touched 10,000 orders per day with a fleet of 600 people.

Speaking to Inc42, Xijit said, “We want to be a first mile company. But we have just started scraping the surface. We are looking at increasing portfolio outside the B2B arm, to provide more services to the consumers. We are also looking at introducing priority options like Next-day-delivery, and same-day-delivery.”

The startup will also invest in technology to automate a lot of processes like calculating price of the parcel.

Promoted under SSN Logistics, Delhivery was started in 2011 by five person — Sahil Barua, Mohit Tandon, Bhavesh Manglani, Suraj Saharan and Kapil Bharati. According to the its website, Delhivery is present in more than 175 cities, connected to over 25,000 sellers and handling over 900,000 products a day. In September 2014, it had raised Series C funding from Renuka Ramnath led private equity firm Multiples Alternate Asset Management with participation from existing investors Nexus Venture Partners and Times Internet.

Commenting on the investment, Sahil Barua, CEO of Delhivery said, “Delhivery was also the seed investor in Parcelled along with Traxcn labs. They are innovating on pickup models, on-site packaging and quality control to simplify the first mile process down to a single button. Backed by the size of the Delhivery network, this would allow consumers to ship from anything anywhere at the press of a button.”

According to a report by Research and Markets, Indian logistics market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 12.17% by 2020, driven by the growth in the manufacturing, retail, FMCG and e-commerce sectors, while the third-party logistics expected to be worth $301.89 Bn by 2020.

Parcelled competes with Indore-based Pickparcel. Mumbai-based Sendd, Gurgaon-based Shipsy and DaakNinja and Bangalore-based Pigen.

Startups especially in the last-mile delivery are riding on this wave. Recently, Mumbai-based Quifers has raised $307 K led by Indian Angel Network (IAN) and Smile Group. Another startup, Ecom Express, raised $133 Mn from an affiliate of global private equity firm Warburg Pincus.

On the other side, hyperlocal logistics startups like Bangalore-based Roadrunnr raised $11 Mn from Sequoia Capital, Nexus Venture Partners and Blume Ventures, while Grab got investment from Zomato. Another B2B hyperlocal delivery startup, Gurgaon-based, Shadowfax, had raised $300K from Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal of Snapdeal, Zishaan Hayath of Powai Lake Ventures and Prashant Malik of Limeroad.

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