Long before anyone called Amitava Saha a logistics founder, his business card said something far less glamorous: senior officer, Tata Steel.
That is the part of his career that rarely makes the headlines. Saha studied at IIT (BHU) Varanasi and then did a PGDM at IIM Lucknow. Profiles describe him as a first-generation entrepreneur from a humble background, though that could not be traced to an interview he gave himself. What the record does show is a plain, steady apprenticeship. After Tata Steel came business development roles at NIIT Technologies and Aricent. Nothing flashy. Sales, targets, travel.
Saha studied at IIT (BHU) Varanasi and then did a PGDM at IIM Lucknow.
What almost nobody connects to his name is how long he spent in jobs where somebody else owned the outcome. By the time he partnered with Supam Maheshwari on Brainvisa Technologies, he had years of sales and operations behind him. At Brainvisa he rose from director to senior vice president. Then came FirstCry, the baby-products e-commerce company they built together, where he was co-founder and COO.
It was at FirstCry that the problem found him. Orders kept going out, and delivery decided whether customers came back. In 2015 the logistics arm became Xpressbees, in Pune, with Saha as chief executive. He discussed that spin-off in a 2016 podcast.
The advantage was volume. The company had shipments from day one, a rare gift in a business that needs density to make money. Alibaba put in about $35 million in 2017. In February 2022 Blackstone, TPG and ChrysCapital led a $300 million round that took the valuation above a billion dollars.
The cost has been the usual one for Indian logistics: money goes out faster than it comes in. Xpressbees reported a net loss of Rs 200 crore on revenue of Rs 2,831 crore in FY24, though it also reported a small positive EBITDA. By March 2025 it ran about 4,500 service centres and over 28,000 delivery partners.
Saha's path suggests something quiet about founders. The loud origin story, the garage and the dropout, is not the only one. Sometimes the preparation is years of unglamorous learning about how things actually get sold and moved, and the company is simply the first problem big enough to use all of it.