Sahil Barua

Sahil Barua is the Co-founder of the much required E-commerce logistics company – Delhivery. In a nutshell, Delhivery is a Delhi based company that helps merchants and brands create successful online businesses by providing E-Commerce technology and core logistics support.

So far, it’s been mostly clear blue skies for Sahil Barua, co-founder and chief executive of ecommerce logistics services company Delhivery. His three-year-old startup has grown 400 percent year-on-year and investors have been queuing up too. The grey clouds have been few and far between, and those Barua recalls with visible sadness. For instance, the time a young man, among the first twenty-five employees to join the firm, decided to leave after 18 months. “It was like breaking up with someone,” says Barua.

But Barua, as co-founder (along with Mohit Tandon, Bhavesh Manglani, Suraj Saharan and Kapil Bharati) of one of the fastest growing startups in the country, can put such worries aside. What started out as a hyper-local express delivery service for offline stores in May 2011, delivering flowers and food from restaurants in Gurgaon for the first few months, is now emerging as a major ecommerce logistics player.

It was all in the timing. 2010-11 saw dozens of online retailers floating businesses and millions of dollars being poured into the segment by global investors. Barua and Tandon, who were working as consultants in Bain & Co, were impressed by the potential of the industry in India. In June 2011, Delhivery got its first ecommerce client, urbantouch.com, an online fashion and beauty retailer. “In August, we made the shift to ecommerce logistics and became focussed on this space,” says Barua. (Barua, who turned 30 on December 25, was 29 in the period considered for the 30 Under 30 List.)

Today, Delhivery has 950 ecommerce companies as its customers; this includes Flipkart (which also has its in-house logistics team). It has six warehouses, a presence across 175 cities and handles over 90,000 shipments daily. Its revenues are sky-rocketing too. From a turnover of Rs 62 crore for FY14, Barua expects to register revenues of Rs 220 crore by the end of March.