RaRa Delivery raises $3.25 mn led by Sequoia Capital's Surge, East Ventures

Instant delivery startup RaRa Delivery raised $3.25 million in funding led by Sequoia Capital India’s Surge and Indonesia’s East Ventures.

RaRa Delivery is Southeast Asia’s only last-mile logistics company in the one to three-hour deliveries segment for e-commerce through their data-driven approach and proprietary technology. RaRa Delivery’s tech team is based in India and aims to scale its India operations from 10 to 40 in the next six months.

“While the express delivery space has been flourishing in sectors such as groceries and healthcare, we saw a unique opportunity to scale this offering across all categories, as customer expectations grow alongside the maturity of Indonesia's e-commerce sector,” said Karan Bhardwaj, founder & CEO, RaRa Delivery.

Instant gratification is becoming a norm across consumer categories as people’s online ordering habits change, with rapid deliveries fast becoming a need rather than a luxury. In Indonesia, consumer appetite for fast convenience has risen and consumers are willing to pay a premium for fast deliveries. The market size for same-day delivery is expected to grow to 30%, totalling 4.5 million parcels a day by 2023, and premium logistics charges for same-day delivery services is projected to increase to IDR 65 trillion in 2023, up from IDR 4.4 trillion in 2018, thereby outpacing the growth in other delivery services.

“Through our smart batching system and with our dedicated driver team who are highly committed to ensuring smooth deliveries, our vision of creating an ecosystem that allows e-commerce marketplaces and sellers to provide a premium customer experience to their end consumers is now becoming a reality, starting first in Indonesia,” added Bhardwaj.

RaRa Delivery was founded in Singapore in July 2019 by Karan Bhardwaj, who graduated from Nanyang Technological University with a major in engineering and a minor in business and entrepreneurship. Prior to founding RaRa Delivery, he was managing the end-to-end e-commerce supply chain at Unilever across Southeast Asia and Australasia.

Led by Sequoia Capital. India’s Surge and Indonesia’s East Ventures, the funding of RaRa Delivery is supported by 500 Startups, Angel Central, GK Plug and Play, and angel investors Royston Tay and Yang Bin Kwok.

RaRa Delivery is part of Surge’s fifth cohort of 23 companies that have developed new digital solutions to help companies and individuals live, work and learn better in a rapidly evolving Southeast Asian landscape.