BENGALURU: Japanese telecom and internet major Softbank has led a $413 million financing round in e-commerce focused logistics platform Delhivery , valuing the eight-year-old company at $1.5 billion. The transaction would make Gurgaon-based startup the latest member of the Unicorn club, the term used for private companies valued over $1 billion, which has doubled to over 20 startups since the end of 2017 (graphic).

Delhivery, which has raised a total of about $675 million including this round, and will be followed by a secondary share sale where early backers like Multiples and Nexus Venture Partners will sell some shares worth about $150 million, according to two sources briefed on the matter.

Delhivery did not revert to the query on RPS investment and secondary share sale. Delhivery said it will increase its reach from 15,000 to 20,000 pin codes in the next 12 months, aggressively grow e-commerce market share investment, and also target new enterprise customers beyond e-commerce and SMEs. The company delivers more than 500,000 parcels a day.

“We will be scaling up our newer warehousing and freight services through large investments in infrastructure and technology and global partnerships,” said CEO Sahil Barua, who co-founded the company in May 2011 with Mohit Tandon, Bhavesh Manglani, Suraj Saharan and Kapil Bharati.

Delhivery had earlier this year acquired India business of Dubai-based Aramex, and is also seeking alliances with logistics players in Middle East, China, and USA. It is also pushing for an expansion into the freight business as it has started building a fleet of trucks so it will now directly take on Rivigo.

For the financial year ending March 2018, Delhivery’s losses increased by 8% to Rs 684 crore while revenues moved up 42% to Rs 1,070 crore.

India’s Unicorn Club Expands, B2B Cos Enter

The new set of Unicorns which have come in over the last 15 months are from more diverse sectors like financial technology, education, and logistics as compared to the previous batch, which was mostly from online commerce and advertising based companies.

An interesting trend here is the emergence of business-to-business (B2B) companies like payments players Billdesk and Pine Labs, and Udaan, which helps connect shopkeepers directly with manufacturers, as compared to primarily direct consumer-facing companies which became Unicorns earlier.

“Now the Unicorns are also getting wider among sectors, as companies like Udaan and Delhivery are purely business-to-business (B2B),” said Anand Lunia, founding partner at early stage investment firm India Quotient.

“Some of the recent companies have grown really fast and the multiplication of revenues is also really quick. The time to reach a Unicorn status has shortened.”

