Founded in 2011, Delhivery has grown from a local on-demand delivery company to a full-fledged logistics services provider in less than five years.
Delhivery was bootstrapped with Rs 60 lakh by its founders – Sahil Barua, Mohit Tandon, Bhavesh Manglani, Suraj Saharan and Kapil Bharati.
Barua, Tandon and Saharan worked together at Bain & Company. Manglani worked with Reliance and Idea Cellular while Bharati worked with Sapient and co-founded Contify before the five joined hands to build Delhivery.
"For the initial eight months, we were five founders, one tech guy, one call centre executive and 30 field guys. It was hard to convince people to join," Barua told Techcircle.in in an interview.
Today, Delhivery has 800 distribution centres across 320 cities in the country with 8,000 delivery boys. It has 1.2 million sq ft of warehousing space with 14 automated sorting centres in the country.
It delivers to 3,700 pin codes in the country currently and plans to reach to 6,500 pin codes by March 2016. "We will have nearly full coverage of the country by the end of next year," said Barua.
The company employs more than 12,000 people. It plans to increase the number to 19,000 people by the end of the financial year and 1,10,000 by 2020.
Barua said he never expected Delhivery to reach this stage. "Our first business plan said that we would have 500 people. Even at that time the discussion was that's too many people. Our second business plan said we would have 1,000 people. We didn't expect to get to this stage," he said.
Barua also said that Delhivery plans to enter more international markets including Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and two countries in Europe. The company is already present in Dubai, he added.
In a video interaction with Techcircle.in, Barua sheds light on his journey in the logistics sector and charts the way forward for Delhivery.