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Logistics startup Pickrr was acquired by its rival Shiprocket recently. While Shiprocket picked up 80% stake in Pickrr for $200 Mn, it would acquire the remaining stake in Pickrr in the next four to six quarters.

Pickrr received the offer from Shiprocket in March-end this year when the former was almost on the verge of completing its Series C funding round. The deal was finally announced earlier this month. 

Pickrr, founded by Ankit Kaushik, Rhitiman Majumder and Gaurav Mangla in 2015, is a Delhi NCR-based logistics player backed by the likes of IIFL, Ananta Capital, Amicus Capital, among others. 

In an interview with Inc42, Pickrr CEO and co-founder Mangla talked about the acquisition by Shiprocket, how it will put it on a fast lane, and much more.

Despite the acquisition, Pickrr will continue to be a standalone entity with its founders and employees continuing in their current roles, Mangla said. The startup is targeting an Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) of $120 Mn by March 2023 and is also eyeing entry into new segments.

Talking about the logistics sector in the country, he said D2C brands are seeing a big rise in their contribution in the sector and it will continue to grow in the coming years. Here are the edited excerpts from the interview:

Inc42: How did the Shiprocket deal come through? What made you agree to the deal?

Gaurav: The offer from Shiprocket was very lucrative. There was a series of negotiations not only on the offer front but also regarding how the two entities would function. Eventually, we came to an agreement that this deal is lucrative for everyone, including investors, founders and employees, plus it accelerates our roadmap from a five-year roadmap to a two-year roadmap. Hence, it made a lot of sense to do a consolidation and to serve all the customers better. 

So, after almost a month-and-a-half of negotiations and discussions, we finally agreed to the deal somewhere around May and the deal got closed on June 24.

Inc42: Can you further explain the roadmap you mentioned?

Gaurav: We have about 500 folks at Pickrr, while Shiprocket has around 800-odd folks, and all of us are working on similar products. So now, we will focus on some products, while they will focus on a few. Also, there are 15-odd new product lines and some geography expansions as well. So, we will take up one or two geographies, Shiprocket will work on one or two, and we will divide those product roadmaps also. So, eventually, the things which would have been deployed and would have been activated for customers in the next three to four years will now happen in one-and-a-half to two years.

Inc42: What are Pickrr’s plans post this acquisition?

Gaurav: First of all, we would like to excel more in India, capture more different types of segments, diversify our customer base, build a strong moat around the enterprise segment…this is priority one. 

Then, foray into certain other lines like cross border, B2B, disrupting traditional checkouts, building much more RTO prediction accuracy, building a lot of tools for D2C brands to help them convert better as well as increase their revenue, reducing returns and solving for the entire experience layer.

Every employee at Pickrr is important and would like everyone to have a much more mature and innovative role going forward. And now for sales books as well, it will be a good proposition if two entities will share leads and share certain customers. We will ensure that customers get the benefit of this deal.

Inc42: Can you throw some light on Pickrr’s current revenue?

Gaurav: Right now, we’re sitting on somewhere around $26.5 Mn of shipping revenue and there are some additional revenues, so you can roughly assume today our ARR is around $50 million. We would want this ARR to touch $120 Mn by March 2023. Right now, Shiprocket has an ARR of around $120 Mn. They would like to touch somewhere around $200 Mn ARR by March 23. So the combined entity should have an over $300 Mn ARR by March 2023.

Inc42: What are the merger agreements?

Gaurav: Pickrr will continue as a standalone entity, it’s a big brand. We almost have half business as compared to Shiprocket. We will excel on our product lines, they will excel on their product lines. All the founders of Pickrr will continue with their roles at the company. The Shiprocket team will stay apart, but some small teams like finance might get merged. 

Inc42: Would all Pickrr employees be retained?

Gaurav: Yes, everybody is retained. It’s kind of a very win-win deal for employees and this was also one of the critical factors that was evaluated in this deal because we have hired all our employees in the last 10-12 months with a lot of aspirations and mapped everyone’s skill set to our roadmap. So, one thing which was very important for us was that there should not be something which can be bad for our employees.

Inc42: Post the acquisition, in which ways do you want to improve Pickrr as a brand?

Gaurav: First of all, we will be less price-sensitive. Second, we would like to roll out things faster, because now there won’t be much investor pressure and there won’t be much competition pressure. Now, it will be only about just delivering value on innovation and ensuring customers get the benefit of it. And third, we would be focusing more on the profitability part as well. 

Inc42: What is the traction like for Pickrr right now?

Gaurav: Right now, we have around 12,000 active sellers transacting daily. There are more than 75,000 sellers active on the platform. We are dealing with 1,20,000 shipments a day and we would like this number to go somewhere around 3,00,000 shipments a day by March 2023. 

Right now, we do somewhere around 6,00,000 shipments as fulfilled by Pickrr through our warehousing network, we would like that number to go above 20,00,000 per month by March 2023. So, there are a lot of milestones for different product lines.

Inc42: Besides D2C, where else do you see market opportunities right now?

Gaurav: There are a lot of opportunities in offline brands – managing their inventory, giving them a lot of stuff with which they can improve their supply chain efficiencies. Then there are super enterprises where we can’t sell our products directly and we would like to give them a solution which will enable an internal Pickrr kind of an environment for them. We would also like to go into B2B distribution for all types of brands – not only D2C but offline bands, traditional brands and more.

We are already enabling a lot of traditional brands, we are doing a lot of B2B stuff. We are also doing cross-border. It is expected in the next one-and-a-half to two years. D2C brands also need to cross-sell their products outside India. So, we are building on that so that this materialises in India and selling outside India becomes easy… so we want to capitalise on that opportunity.

Inc42: How will you approach geographical expansion?

Gaurav: Right now, Shiprocket has its roots in KSA (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia). There is a lot of learning which we are also exploring. They are moving to the UAE also. There are two other opportunities in Latin America, Brazil, and Mexico kind of geographies. Hopefully, we will also take one of those geographies.

We’re still finalising which area to focus on. Probably we’ll pick one area and focus and that thing will get materialised in the next six to 12 months.

Inc42: Can you give some insights into the changing logistics landscape?

Gaurav: When we started, there was nothing like a D2C brand. It was ecommerce. Horizontal marketplaces were dominating 98% of the ecommerce market. In 2018, that dominance came to 95:5. Post-Covid, that dominance came down to 80:20. Now with solutions like Pickrr and Shiprocket maturing so rapidly, it is expected that by FY26, horizontals will contribute somewhere around 57% of the market and 43% will go to the D2C brands. So, we want to play a key role in enabling this shift and this is something all of us are focusing very rapidly on.