Delhivery, Tracxn Labs invest $5 mn in logistics firm Parcelled

The Bengaluru-based startup helps consumers, small marketplace sellers and small and medium businesses ship items on demand

Parcelled, a startup that tries to solve problems in the first-mile logistics segment in India, has raised $5 million (Rs 32 crore) in Series A round of funding that was led by existing investors Delhivery, a logistics company and startup incubator Tracxn labs. First-mile delivery involves collecting items from a customer's door step and aggregating them in one location from where they get further connected to a delivery network.

"Parcelled will use the funds to strengthen its core technology platform, expansion of its team, diversify its product offerings and launch of multiple cities over the next six months," said Xitij Kothi, chief executive officer and co-founder of the company.

Bengaluru-based Parcelled helps consumers, small marketplace sellers and small and medium businesses ship items on demand. The company's ground staff picks up the item to be shipped, inspects it, packs it and thus takes care of the end-to-end delivery. While gifting and return shipments from online retailing are the major use cases for Parcelled, the company also cater to a lot of small e-commerce marketplace sellers.

Currently, Parcelled delivers its services across 13 cities including Delhi, Bengaluru, Mumbai, Pune, Jaipur, Chennai, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Surat, Indore, Gurgaon/Noida and Ahmedabad. "There is a lot of untapped potential in this space and a need for a convenient, trustworthy, cost-efficient and fast logistics service. With the inflow of funds we are looking to build a transparent, reliable and trusted logistics platform in India," said Kothi. He founded the company early this year with four other IITians including Nikhil Bansal, Prateek Bhandari, Rikin Kachhia and Abhishek Srivastava. Customers can avail services from Parcelled through both its website and mobile application.

Most of the delivery and logistics companies in India that took birth with the onset of the e-commerce boom in the country, are focused on solving the last-mile delivery woes, including shipping ordered products at customers' doorsteps. However, Parcelled tries to solve customer-to-customer and peer-to-peer delivery hurdles, for instance, delivering a laptop within the city as well as between cities or shipping household goods if a customer is shifting to a new city .

"They are innovating on pickup models, onsite packaging and quality control to simplify the first mile process down to a single button. Backed by the size of the Delhivery network this would allow consumers to ship from anything anywhere at the press of a button," said Sahil Barua, chief executive officer of Delhivery. This is Delhivery's second investment in a logistics company within a week. Last week, it had led the $7-million investment round in hyperlocal delivery service Opinio.