IPO-bound Delhivery buys another logistics company to strengthen its business offering

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IPO-bound Delhivery buys another logistics company to strengthen its business offering
Delhivery
  • Delhivery has reportedly acquired Spoton in an all cash deal worth $300 million
  • Spoton is Delhivery’s second acquisition this year, after Primaseller.
  • Delhivery claims to have fulfilled more than 850 million transactions to date and works with over 10,000 direct customers.
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Logistics company Delhivery is looking to strengthen its business-to-business (B2B) vertical ahead of its planned initial public offering (IPO) with the acquisition of Bengaluru-based Spoton Logistics.

Spoton Logistics is an engineering and technology-driven logistics company, which was founded in 2012 after private equity firm India Equity Partners (IEP) bought the domestic business from TNT India. Samara Capital and Xponentia, who together acquired Spoton from IEP in 2018, are making a full exit for cash as part of the transaction.

The duo has not shared any transactional details of this acquisition. However, an Economic Times report citing anonymous sources highlighted that it is an all-cash deal worth $300 million.

According to the company’s LinkedIn page, Spoton has operations across more than 350 locations covering over 22,000 pin codes. The nine-year-old startup services customers in an array of industries including hi-tech, automotive, engineering, pharmaceutical, electronics and electricals, and lifestyle, retail and e-commerce.

Abhik Mitra, managing director of Spoton, said that the company is known for its focus on customer relationships and service quality, professional management and technology and engineering, “which are values shared by Delhivery as well.”

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Commenting on the same, Sahil Barua, chief executive of Delhivery said in a press note, "This development is consistent with our objective of being growth-oriented and building scale in each of our business lines. Over the last 10 years, Delhivery has established a leading position in B2C logistics, and now by combining our truckload business with Spoton's, we will be on the path to the same position in B2B express as well.”

Delhivery had also acquired software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform Primaseller in March 2021. The acquisition of Primaseller helped the IPO-bound company to strengthen its long-term vision of becoming an operating system for commerce in India.

Founded by Mohit Tandon, Sahil Barua, Bhavesh Manglani, Kapil Bharati and Suraj Saharan in 2011, Delhivery claims to have fulfilled more than 850 million transactions to date and works with over 10,000 direct customers.

The company is reportedly planning to go public in 2021. Two of the company’s co-founders — Manglani and Tandon — have already stepped out of the company, reportedly to meet regulatory requirements before starting their initial public offering (IPO) process.

The company raised $100 million last month from FedEx Express, a subsidiary of the global logistics giant FedEx Corporation. This is FedEx’s first such strategic investment in an Indian company.

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Delhivery has raised somewhere around $1.24 billion to date, from marquee investors like SoftBank Vision Fund, Tiger Global Management, Times Internet, The Carlyle Group and Steadview Capital. It entered the unicorn club back in 2019, after raising $413 million from SoftBank and others.

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