Delhivery's Road to IPO

In this video, we take a look at the journey of Delhivery, leading Indian delivery and e-commerce logistics company, from its origin back in 2011 to its IPO now, in 2022.

00:00 Introduction
00:51 Origins
05:26 The Pivot: from hyperlocal to e-commerce logistics
09:39 What was Delhivery doing differently?
12:12 Growth and competition

Origins: Back in 2008, Sahil Barua wanted to start a business, where he would help startups in scaling by providing them expertise and finance. However, he couldn't achieve this and took a job at Bain and Company instead. Here Sahil met his future co-founders, Suraj Saharan and Mohit Tandon. This was the time when e-commerce and food delivery were taking shape in India and this trio decided to jump onto this opportunity. After talking to co-founders of Zomato Deepinder Goyal and Pankaj Chaddah, Sahil, Mohit, and Suraj decided to start a hyperlocal, Delhi-based delivery service geared towards restaurants. They onboarded Bhavesh Manglani as fourth co-founder who was good at coding. They hired an entire fleet of delivery boys from a restaurant in Delhi, which was shutting down, and this was how Delhivery started.

The Pivot: from hyperlocal to e-commerce logistics - Delhivery started as a food delivery startups but soon realised the potential in delivering other e-commerce goods like clothes. And so, the team decided to start delivering e-commerce goods along with their ongoing food business. They soon realised that existing logistics delivery companies like Blue Dart and DTDC weren't doing a great job and were taking 2-3 days to deliver goods for small distances. This was because they were using something known as hub and spoke model, which was inherently slow. The team realised that they can disrupt this model with a quicker one by using technology into a model known as Mesh Network model, that enabled them to deliver packages faster and cheaper than anybody else. After doing this, Delhivery's revenue rose four times and that's why they decided to pivot from a food delivery to a fully-fledged e-commerce logistics startup.

What was Delhivery doing differently? - Delhivery first and foremost focused on customer-centricity. They decided to do everything that their customer would like, for eg. real time updates or orders. Next they did, which was never tried before in India - modularity. They started offering first-mile delivery, last-mile delivery, and middle-mile delivery as separate, standalone services, alongside their comprehensive, full service packages. This made their business extremely efficient and cheaper. Next thing was, payment collection, which was a huge pain point at the time. At that time, the time taken from a customer paying money to it reflecting in the bank account of seller, could be over 30 days. Delhivery decided to change this by setting up collection centres close to bank and then in 2013, acquired cash-collection startup GharPay, to speed things up even further. By doing this, Delhivery was able to cut down this time from 30 days to 2 days.

Growth and competition - Delhivery started to grow rapidly and they started by giving 30 day free trial to their potential customers. They converted most of these customers as their service was so much better. They acquired their biggest clients at the time, IndiaTimes, by doing this only. They believed in their product so much, that they would go to a potential customer and offer them free trial. Then they decided to perfect their operation at one place, before expanding to more cities. They took one year to perfect their operations in Gurugram and then successfully replicated to other cities in India, and today they cover 88.3% of all PIN codes in India.

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