How unicorn Shiprocket’s new bets add up

Logistics aggregator Shiprocket reached the startup launchpad in 2016 after a six-year search for the right product-market fit. The idea it settled on was to help fledgling direct-to-consumer brands and smaller merchants, which were not on Flipkart or Amazon, find cheaper delivery options. This was one of the big missing pieces in the Indian ecommerce story.

Shiprocket built a SaaS platform that combined orders from sellers on different routes and showed them a ranking of delivery companies based on price, speed and other parameters.

Today, about 250,000 sellers book the services of 17 courier partners through the platform, which facilitates 100 million shipments a year. For context, Delhivery, one of the largest movers of merchandise in India, handled 161 million express parcels in the second quarter of FY23.

Shiprocket hasn’t decelerated after lift-off. If anything, the past 18 months have been even more frenetic. This August, it raised $32 million in an extension of its $185-million funding round, which Zomato, Lightrock and Temasek led in December 2021. The fresh injection gave it a unicorn valuation of $1.2 billion.