Sahil Barua called Bhavesh Manglani, a man he had met in Mumbai in 2009 through a mutual friend, and asked him to come along. Manglani, who had been introduced as a tech expert, said yes. That phone call is how a logistics company got its engineer before it had a single big customer.
Barua was 29 when Delhivery began. He had graduated from IIM Bangalore and worked as a management consultant at Bain & Company, and Suraj Saharan and Mohit Tandon came from Bain too. Manglani and Kapil Bharati came from other organisations. Their reason for leaving consulting was simple and a little reckless. Barua later said it was the most interesting problem they could think of in the internet space.
He had graduated from IIM Bangalore and worked as a management consultant at Bain & Company, and Suraj Saharan and Mohit Tandon came from Bain too.
It started small. The company began in Gurugram in 2011 as a same-day delivery service for offline stores, and its first e-commerce client signed up in June. For the first six months, the founders have said, they bootstrapped with their own money. They won Chennai as their first city outside Delhi. By 2014 they were handling around 600 orders a day.
Nothing about this was easy to sell. Investors needed convincing that a third-party logistics company could thrive in India. A rival, Chhotu.in, shut down after failing to raise funds, and an investor said of the sector that it was a difficult business. Delhivery was also dearer than the small operators and cheaper than Blue Dart and FedEx, caught between both.
The founders were unhappy being only a delivery company, so they added fulfilment centres. Times Internet put in ₹6.6 crore in 2012, and in 2013 Nexus and Times added ₹35 crore. In 2019 SoftBank invested $413 million. By May 2022 the company listed, raising ₹5,235 crore at a valuation of about ₹35,283 crore.
The founding team did not stay together. Reports differ on timing, but Manglani reportedly left in December 2020, and others followed by March 2021. The company went on to buy Spoton and then Ecom Express, and the integration cost it: Delhivery reported a loss of ₹50.37 crore in the September 2025 quarter, though revenue rose 17 percent to ₹2,559 crore. For FY25 it posted revenue of ₹9,372 crore and net income of ₹162 crore.
The lesson: a start-up built on other people's customers has to win them one parcel at a time. Delhivery lasted because its founders kept refusing to be only a delivery company, and because the first hire was a call to someone they already trusted.