The VCpreneur: Startups | Venture Capital | Entrepreneurship | Fundraising EP#68 Vishesh Khurana – Building Shiprocket to enable e-commerce in India, the scale up journey and approach to inorganic growth
In this episode, Vishesh Khurana, Co-Founder @Shiprocket, joins our host Digjay, to talk about his background and path leading up to Shiprocket, macro tailwinds that shaped Shiprocket’s evolution and its current product stack, challenges faced when scaling up Shiprocket, empowering leaders and people management, Shiprocket’s inorganic growth playbook, fundraising journey and value add from investors.
Shiprocket is a logistics enablement platform that offers SaaS solutions to online sellers and D2C brands for aggregating and choosing the best logistics partner to ship their e-commerce orders. Shiprocket is backed by some marquee investors like Lightrock, Temasek, Zomato, Bertelsmann, Moore Strategic Ventures, March Venture Capital, and Paypal among others. Till date, Shiprocket has made five acquisitions, including cargo shipping business Rocketbox, supply chain management solution Glaucus, marketing automation platform Wigzo, logistics aggregator Pickrr and Arvin Internet’s retail enablement business, Omuni.
You can connect with Vishesh here on Linkedin / Twitter
----
Show notes –
(01:31) Vishesh’s path leading up to Shiprocket
(02:59) Genesis of Shiprocket
(06:23) Macro tailwinds that shaped Shiprocket’s evolution and its current product stack
(13:06) Importance of building an alternate demand ecosystem to scale up an e-commerce business
(14:57) Challenges faced when scaling up Shiprocket; Approach to partnerships and competition
(21:31) Empowering leaders and people management
(23:17) Shiprocket’s inorganic growth playbook
(28:56) Fundraising journey and value add from investors
(36:56) Shiprocket's expansion plans
(38:28) How has being a founder influenced Vishesh over the years?
(40:29) Rapid fire and closing remarks
----
If you liked our episode, you can subscribe to our podcast on any podcast platform of your choice (like Spotify & Apple iTunes). We would appreciate if you could leave us a review on Spotify or Apple iTunes. This helps others discover the podcast organically. You can visit thevcpreneur.com and follow us on Twitter @thevcpreneur_ & Instagram @thevcpreneur for more episodes and interesting insights on the startup ecosystem. You can also follow our host Digjay here on Linkedin & Twitter