Parcelled, the Bangalore-based on-demand shipping service providing startup, is announcing a fresh $5 million fundraise, led by — well — another major logistics player Delhivery . The funding will be used by the company to strengthen its core technology, cut costs.
While we talk about Parcelled, it is interesting to see how Delhivery has been strategically expanding its footprint, both via user-base and such investments into smaller related businesses. Just a few days ago, Delhivery had invested in another logistics company Opinio in its $7 Million fresh round.
Coming back to Parcelled, the startup is also planning to expand its operations across 50 other cities in the country within the coming six months, by utilising the newly infused funding in the company.
The company’s business-to-business arm also provides reverse logistics capabilities to marketplaces, thus also acting as the primary revenue source for the logistics startup. Having a ground staff of more than 600 people, Parcelled claims that it can deploy its delivery staff to pick, inspect and pack items within 30 minutes.
Sahil Barua, CEO of Delhivery, said,
Parcelled is innovating on pickup models, on-site packaging and quality control while simplifying the first mile process down to a single button. Backed by the size of the Delhivery network this will allow consumers to ship from anywhere at the press of a button.
Xitij Kothi, founder of the company, said,
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.
Founded by Xitij Kothi, Rikin Kachhia, Abhishek Srivastava and Nikhil Bansal in March 2015, Parcelled helps consumers, small marketplace sellers & SMBs ship items on-demand. In July, the company had raised an undisclosed amount in strategic funding from Delhivery and Tracxn Labs.
It has scaled up to 10 offices across India with a team of more than 110 people. The company claiming to be handling nearly 10,000 shipments on daily basis.
As the e-commerce business (despite those valuation and profit troubles) continues to boom in India, key enablers like Logistics have become a key sector of growth which lays the foundation. As per a report, the Third Party Logistics market in India is expected to touch Rs 48,000 crore by 2019.
The logistics market of India 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.
