Avendus Future Leaders Fund buys stakes in XpressBees from Elevation

Avendus Future Leaders Fund has invested Rs 195 crore in Xpressbees, an e-commerce-focused end-to-end supply chain solutions provider, in a secondary transaction.

According to Avendus, it has bought minority stakes in XpressBees from the latter’s existing backer Elevation Capital. This comes six months after the Pune-based company entered the unicorn club following a $300 million Series  F round.

During the Series F round, XpressBees deployed $200 million to provide partial exits to Elevation Capital and Alibaba while it facilitated full exit to CDH Investments. XpressBees was valued at $1.2 billion during the round and has raised around $575 million to date.

Founded by Amitava Saha and Supam Maheshwari, XpressBees’s journey as logistics was kicked off as a logistics arm of FirstCry. However, the firm relaunched as a separate entity in 2015. The company offers first and last-mile delivery and reverse logistics with facilities such as real-time tracking, multiple payment collection and processing options.

Currently present in more than 3,000 cities, the firm also offers 3PL and cross-border operations and claims to serve over 20,000 pin codes and delivers over 1.5 million packages per day. It works with notable companies such as Flipkart, Amazon, Meesho, Purplle, Myntra and FirstCry among others.

While XpressBees is yet to file its annual financial report for FY22, the company’s revenue from operations stood at Rs 1,004.8 crore, registering a 32.7% growth as compared to Rs 757.2 crore earned during FY20. As per Fintrackr’s analysis, annual losses of the company also reduced by 36.2% from Rs 102.7 crore in FY20 to Rs 65.5 crore during FY21. As a result, its EBITDA margins also improved.

XpressBees competes with Delhivery (now a public company) and Shadowfax. SoftBank-backed Delhivery posted Rs 7,241 crore in revenue in FY22 from Rs 4,450 crore in the previous year. Flipkart-backed Shadowfax, which recorded 43.7% jump in its operating revenue to Rs 463.8 crore in FY21, has not disclosed FY22 numbers yet. The Bengaluru-based startup kicked off a new round at a $600 million valuation. Entrackr exclusively reported the development on July 11.