Delhivery in talks to raise $250 Mn at over $1 billion valuation from Softbank

E-commerce focused logistic player Delhivery is in talks with Softbank to raise $200-250 million in a fresh round.

Masayoshi Son-led $100 billion funds has been evaluating the deal in logistics platform for last few months. The financing round will come at a post-money valuation of around $1.2 billion, said a person aware of the development.

This will be SoftBank's fourth investment this year in India after Paytm Mall, Policybazaar and Oyo.

The latest round will give impetus to the logistics firm to work out its IPO plan, which has been at the backend for last 18 months. The logistics player had appointed investment
banks Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and Kotak for its IPO plan to provide a partial exit to some of its investors.

In the last round raised from the Carlyle Group, Delhivery was valued at about $800 million.

Till date, Delhivery has raised an estimated $260 million from investors such as Carlyle Group, Chinese diversified conglomerate Fosun International, Tiger Global Management and Times Internet.

Last year, it was also in talks to raise a funding round from Alibaba. But talks could not materialised.

Launched in 2011 by Sahil Barua, Mohit Tandon, and Suraj Saharan. Later, they were joined by Bhavesh Manglani and Kapil Bharati.

Bhavesh Manglani, who was at Chindia conference 2018, which happened last week, said that there is a lot to learn from Chinese logistics startups and industry.

"We get a lot of ideas from China logistics models to not to repeat mistakes. We have also tried to implement few learnings like reducing shipment cost in India and replicated that in the last three years," said Manglani. He further said that there is a vast opportunity not only in core supply chain but associated services.

At present, Delhivery claims to service over 1200 cities and 12000 pin codes. The logistics major has about 24 fulfilment centres for B2C and B2B fulfilment services and works with companies like Flipkart, Paytm and several others.

In FY17, it registered around 44% increase in total revenues to Rs 751 crore. The company’s losses dropped from Rs 317 crore during FY16 to Rs 249 crore.

The development was first reported by ET.