Carlyle, SoftBank to part-sell stake in Delhivery’s $1-billion IPO

The Gurugram-based company, which is
expected to file its draft IPO papers in the next few days, is looking to raise primary capital of about Rs 5,000 crore from its public issue. Delhivery will aim to list by early next year at a valuation of around $6-6.5 billion.

While the US private equity major Carlyle, which first backed Delhivery in 2017, will liquidate shares worth $100 million or Rs 750 crore, Chinese investor Fosun is learnt to be completely exiting the company via the OFS process, said two people familiar with the matter. Others like SoftBank Vision Fund and Times Internet will sell shares worth $100 million and $50 million, respectively. Times Internet is part of the Times Group, which also owns ETtech.

Carlyle holds 10.3% in Delhivery while SoftBank has a 22.2% stake as of September 29, according to data from Tracxn.

Emailed queries sent by ET to spokespersons of Carlyle, Fosun and SoftBank did not elicit any response. Delhivery and Times Internet did not offer a comment on the development.

In the lead-up to the IPO, the logistics tech company said in filings made with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs that it had issued around 39,99,400 shares to 207 employees under its employee stock option scheme, data sourced from business intelligence platform Tofler showed. Further, as part of its IPO preparations, Delhivery appointed Kalpana Morparia, Romesh Sobti, and Saugata Gupta as independent board directors.

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It
converted into a public company, a mandatory requirement before listing on stock exchanges and split its shares in the ratio of 1:10, as reported by ET.

As part of its pre-IPO funding round, in September, the company said Lee Fixel, former partner at New York-based investment firm Tiger Global, had
invested a total of $125 million through his fund Addition, partly through a secondary purchase of shares from China’s Fosun. The Chinese fund sold 1.32% of its 3.8% stake in the company, after which it was valued at $4 billion, as reported by ET last month.

The investment from Fixel was a continuation of the pre-IPO financing which saw the company rack up $100 million from strategic investor FedEx Express in August. Earlier in June, Delhivery said it had raised $277 million from investors led by Singapore’s GIC and US-based Fidelity Management.

In an
interview with ET in June, Sahil Barua, CEO of Delhivery, had for the first time defined a timeline for going public amid a rush of Indian startups tapping the IPO market. The logistics firm had constituted a board sub-committee for its IPO and mergers and acquisitions in January, Barua had told ET.

Founded by Sahil Barua, Mohit Tandon, Bhavesh Manglani, Suraj Saharan, and Kapil Bharati, Delhivery is an end-to-end logistics and supply chain services company. It has fulfilled over a billion shipments with over 17,000 customers, including large and small ecommerce participants, SMEs and other enterprises.

Earlier this year, Manglani and Tandon decided to step aside from the day-to-day operations of the startup they co-founded nearly 10 years ago. They have also been reclassified as ‘retiring/non-active promoters’ for their stakes in Delhivery.

The company counts other funds such as Tiger Global, CPPIB and Nexus Venture Partners, among others, as its shareholders.

Sandeep Barasia, managing director and chief business officer, Delhivery had told ET in June that the startup had clocked revenue of more than Rs 3,700 crore in 2020-21. The company reported a revenue of over Rs 2,988 crore in FY20 with a loss of around Rs 269 crore during the same period.

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ETtech IPO Watch: A decade of Delhivery