Sahil Barua: Bio, Wiki, Age, Family, Career and Net Worth
Success never happens overnight. There are countless ups and downs, and much work must be put in over time. His success story is therefore bit too similar to others’.
You have no idea, but Sahil returned to Bain & Company in 2008 as a full-time Associate Consultant after completing his post-graduation.
And in June 2009, he received a promotion within a year to Senior Associate Consultant. After that, he concentrated on looking at industries like private equity, telecommunications, and healthcare.
He was given the opportunity to be promoted as a Consultant in June 2010 with a more defined portfolio and additional duties to handle because of his continued renunciation diligence.
Suraj Saharan and Mohit Tandon became his friends while he was employed by Bain & Company. During all of this, he had the thought to launch an online business. Suraj and Mohit shared this thought, so they both went ahead and got their hands on it.
Since Deepinder Goyal and Pankaj Shahadah, the founder of zomato, were acquainted with the three. Abhishek and Goyal gave them an undisclosed sum of money to carry out the project.
On this basis, they started their career in business and opened their first corporate office in Gurgaon with 10 employees, including 4 delivery persons. Later, he formed an alliance with nearby restaurants and immediately began to fulfill requests.
This was successful since at the time the Indian market needed a reliable distribution infrastructure. Within the first four years of the company’s existence, it increased by 400%.
Thus, in a way, his Delhivery model still dominates the market despite other competitors.
Personal Life of Sahil Barua
Sahil’s private and professional lives could hardly be more dissimilar. He is a quiet man who values his solitude greatly.
His day begins with a review of the Management Information System (MIS) records, followed by a glance at the shipments that were expected to arrive and a calculation of the revenue earned. He then scans the list of deliveries that must be made today.
Details on Delhivery
Technology, in Sahil Barua’s opinion, is the key to success. He is unable to remain seated in front of the computer screen for an extended period of time. He prefers to roam about and interact with the team members every 20 minutes. Based in Gurgaon, Delhivery is a logistics and supply chain firm in India. Sahil Barua, Mohit Tandon, Bhavesh Manglani, Suraj Saharan, and Kapil Bharati created it in 2011. As of 2021, the company had more than 85 fulfillment centers, 24 automated sorting facilities, 70 hubs, 7,500+ partner facilities, and 3,000+ direct delivery facilities. Giving e-commerce businesses third-party logistics and delivery services accounts for almost two thirds of its revenue.
History of Delhivery
In May 2011, Delhivery was founded as SSN Logistics Ltd. For the first few months after its conception, Gurgaon residents could order food and flowers to be delivered locally through the company’s hyperlocal express delivery service. At that time, India’s online retailing and e-commerce sector was growing quickly, and the industry attracted a lot of attention from international investors.
The industry’s scale and potential attracted the founders, Barua and Tandon, who at the time were working as consultants for the management consulting firm Bain & Company. They made the decision to concentrate on the sector as a result.
Delhivery secured its first e-commerce client, online fashion and beauty retailer Urban Touch, in June 2011. By August 2011, Delhivery had fully changed its business model to provide logistical services to several e-commerce businesses.
With a $413 million investment from SoftBank, Delhivery raised its largest round of funding in March 2019.
Delhivery announced in May 2021 that it has raised an additional $277 million in a fundraising round headed by Fidelity, bringing its market capitalization to about $3 billion.
For 1,600 crore (US$200 million), Delhivery purchased the B2B logistics firm Spoton Logistics in August 2021.
It bought Transition Robotics Inc., a California-based manufacturer of unmanned aircraft systems, in December 2021.
Before its IPO in May 2022, Delhivery raised 2,347 crore (US$290 million) in investment from 64 anchor investors.
Delhivery floated on the BSE and NSE in May 2022 after launching its initial public offering (IPO) for 5,235 crore (US$660 million) at a valuation of 35,283 crore (US$4.4 billion).
Delhivery Organization
Sahil Barua, the company’s founder, serves as CEO, and Kapil Bharati, a co-founder, as CTO. In December 2018, Sandeep Barasia, a managing director, was chosen to serve as the chief business officer. He is responsible for the P&L for the freight, warehousing, and parcel divisions. Ajith Pai, who had been the CFO, simultaneously assumed the position of COO and is now in control of the business’s operations, engineering, human resources, and finances. Amit Agarwal, an IIT-Kanpur alumni who was formerly Delhivery’s vice president of finance, assumed the position of CFO in the interim. On March 30, 2021, the company witnessed the departure of two founders.
Investors of Delhivery
The two largest shareholders in the business as of November 2021 are SoftBank Group (22.78%) and Nexus Venture Partners (9.23%). The Carlyle Group, CPP Investment Board, Tiger Global, and Times Internet are other investors with a combined ownership of more than 5%. Through 13 private fundraising rounds, Delhivery has received roughly US$1.4 billion from its investors as of December 2021.
The Delhivery Story
At that time, Sahil worked at Bain & Co. alongside the eventual co-founders of Delhivery, Suraj Saharan and Mohit Tandon.
Their shared views and desire to launch their own businesses were among the factors that strengthened their connection even further.
The only issue was that they didn’t know where to begin!
But taking the plunge, they chose to leave their employment for a six-month break in order to work things out!
All three of them were already quite interested in the internet industry, and the statistics also suggested that the growth would be phenomenal.
Their acquaintance with Pankaj Chaddah and Deepinder Goyal, the creators of Zomato, also aided them.
Now, Zomato’s business consisted merely of using the internet to connect users with restaurants. They have this fantastic concept as a result! The delivery option was what the Indian internet market lacked after witnessing the restaurants.
Surprisingly, there wasn’t even a physical or online model created for a restaurant delivery network!
At this point, the idea began to take shape in their minds. They started discussing and making plans, and before they knew it, the idea was ready to be served!
Delivery Boys, sometimes known as Human Resources, have to be used to finish the job!
At that point, they discovered a restaurant where they frequently placed food orders! He informed them that he was closing down and wanted to relocate his personnel after having a brief conversation with the owner. They employed all of them without giving it any thought!
In Gurgaon, they opened their first corporate office in a 250 square foot space with a crew of 10 individuals, including 4 delivery workers. After that, they got going by forming partnerships with nearby eateries and completing the orders for them in less than 30 minutes.
The model was so distinctive that business took off right away. They quickly reached around 100 orders per day in Gurgaon alone.
Website for Delhivery
One day, Abhishek Goyal approached them and asked, “Why don’t you deliver things for me as well? If you can deliver food in half an hour.”
As a result, Delhivery acquired its first online store client, urbantouch.com, in June 2011. After watching their growth and success, Prashant from Healthkart joined as their second customer.
At that point, they understood that this business model was truly beneficial to both them and the e-commerce companies, as well as to the clients who were now delighted to receive their packages on time.
But the question of why Blue Dart couldn’t accomplish what they were accomplishing got them to thinking.
As a result, Suraj and Sahil started researching the market and possible rivals to better comprehend it. They started using several delivery services to send each other parcels, placed a lot of online orders to learn more about the delivery networks’ primary objectives, etc.
They soon realized that the real issue was that traditional delivery partners like Blue Dart and others didn’t fully grasp the potential that e-commerce as a whole held, and that because the way e-commerce delivery operated was fundamentally different from traditional delivery, they were more at ease with their own established practices.
They realized then that online shopping is a huge opportunity and that they could always return to restaurant deliveries later.
Having stated that, the formal transition of Delhivery was made in January 2011 along with his Co-Founders, Mohit Tandon, Bhavesh Manglani, Suraj Saharan, and Kapil Bharati!
Expansion of Delhivery
Delhivery used to charge quite little for deliveries back in the day. A 500 gram packet transfer within the National Capital Region (NCR), a packet transfer of the same weight to metro cities, and tier 2 and tier 3 locations were all included in their package.
They began by approaching clients and inviting them to check out their services. Delhivery approached customers and offered them a free month of service for the first year and a half.
Even their first-time consumers were asked to take a chance with 30 packages every day, and if they could keep their promise, to increase it to 50, and eventually to whatever level they were comfortable with.
For five of their E-commerce clients in the Delhi NCR region, the company was shipping over 500 shipments each day by year’s end. Their squad strength had increased to 25, and they now had three centers in the Union Territory as a whole.
The company began 2012 with a fund-raiser from Times Internet Limited, which was followed by the introduction of fulfillment services with more than 10,000 square feet of fulfillment facilities in both Delhi and Chennai. They also rebranded their collection centers at the same time!
Due to this significant expansion of their storage space, they were now able to expand their service area to 31 locations, manage 75 clients and 53 vendors, clock or process up to 50,000 shipments every month, and dispatch more than 9,000 shipments per day.
After obtaining suggestions and input from their clients, they made several adjustments to their current IT and physical structure in 2013, more like a modification phase.
They even consulted with clients to ensure that they were receiving what they needed via Delhivery’s IT system, and if anything appeared to be lacking, their team created it.
Together, their engineering and technology teams designed the layout for the easiest and most user-friendly navigation system.
They also introduced a range of commerce-related technologies, such as Vendor Panel, Godam, and FALCON.
And by the end of the year, Delhivery had raised $5 Million more in a Series B fundraising round from Nexus Venture Partners.
As of today, Delhivery serves more than 175 locations in India, the Middle East, and South Asia. They have also added 12 more fulfillment facilities to their existing network, are able to serve more than 800 clients and 25000 sellers, and can process more than 250,000 shipments per day.
The company has experienced 400% growth in less than 4 years and has thus far raised $127.5 million from 5 investors over the course of 4 rounds, with $85 million of that amount coming in 2015.
Delhivery continues to dominate the market despite fierce competition from companies like Ecom Express and QuickDel Logistics, and will also generate enormous revenues of Rs. 220 crores in 2015.
Furthermore, Delhivery is scheduled to reach full profitability by 2016 and is now breaking even month to month, which is even more exciting to hear.