Celebrating Shiprocket's IPO: A decade of e-commerce backbone, by their co-hikers at BII

Bertelsmann India Investments (BII) first backed Shiprocket in 2015, when a small merchant in India still could not reliably get a parcel across the country. Watching the Shiprocket team ring the IPO bell ten years later has been one of the key milestones in building category-defining companies.

BII congratulates Saahil, Gautam, Akshay, Vishesh and every person who built this business - and to the 4 lakh merchants who trusted the platform with their orders long before any of this looked inevitable.

What the company has built is India's only and leading e-commerce enablement stack for small merchants and D2C brands - assembled one layer at a time, over a decade, in an order almost nobody else in the world has attempted. That's the achievement worth celebrating today, because this e-commerce stack is not copied from a global company. It has been built grounds-up, keeping in mind the unique requirements of Indian merchants.

"A lot of investors avoid complex businesses. We've always run towards them, because complexity buys you time and punishes tourists. Shiprocket was about as complex as it gets, two sides of a marketplace, 150+ partner integrations, warehousing technology solutions, an entire software stack built for India. That platform which solved for this complexity is exactly what we backed. It's also exactly why it's hard to copy." - Pankaj Makkar, Managing Director, Bertelsmann India Investments

When Saahil and the team came to us with Shiprocket, they were asking us to believe in something that had never been built anywhere else. That required a particular kind of conviction: not in a financial model, but in founders who understood a problem so deeply that they could invent the solution from scratch.

"Bertelsmann allowed us to find our path, instead of typecasting us into a mould from day one," Saahil reflects. "They made us think strategically about whether we had network effects, data scale, and ability to defend ourselves against competition, basically, all the hard questions we needed to ask ourselves. "

That strategic questioning - alongside unwavering conviction - became the foundation of the Bertelsmann India Investments & Shiprocket partnership, as showcased in the ‘Trek to IPO’ Film. Because the interesting part isn't the decision to invest. It's everything that got built afterwards.

Rohit Sood, Partner at Bertelsmann India Investments, once told the founders ‘to think hard about who they bring on as an investor, because the right one can be a real superpower’. It cuts both ways. The investor has to earn the description, and you only find out over the years.

Pankaj Makkar recalls how they have fought all the crazy stuff together and seen some amazing highs. Long lunches after board meetings, once the agenda ran out. Treks from Joshua Tree to Munich. Filming ‘Trek to IPO’, where product talk gave way to families and leadership and life, West Coast trips, annual Diwali and Christmas parties. Somewhere in there, professional respect became genuine friendship, and an investment became a partnership in the full sense of the word. Watch the film here:

 That journey - the mountaintops and the valleys, the strategic breakthroughs and the late-night problem solving, the celebrations and the setbacks - is what the film Trek to IPO documents. It's not a conventional IPO announcement film. It's a portrait of what happens when an investor and founders commit to each other for the long term, with genuine belief in what they're building and why it matters.

Not a Finish Line, But the Latest Chapter

For Bertelsmann India Investments, Shiprocket's IPO is less a finish line, but the latest chapter in a decade spent building the infrastructure Indian ecommerce now runs on. The conviction was never only in logistics - it was in the merchants and small businesses that could build, sell, and scale because that infrastructure existed.

That's why we're maintaining a significant anchor stake following the IPO. We remain convinced in Shiprocket's next chapter of growth, and we want to participate in the value creation ahead. We're not running towards the exit door. We're walking deeper into the partnership.

As India enters its next phase of e-commerce growth, Trek to IPO turns the spotlight on the invisible systems that helped businesses scale across India - one integration, one data point, one merchant at a time. Shiprocket isn't a courier. It's the enablement layer that gives a small merchant the capabilities of a large one - the rates, the reach, the routing intelligence, the customer experience, the fulfillment speed.

Trek to IPO: Documenting a Decade-Long Partnership

Conceptualized and directed by award-winning filmmaker Kushaal Chawla and his production house Dream Slate Pictures, Trek to IPO traces the decade-long partnership between BII and Shiprocket's founders - a relationship forged not just in boardrooms, but on mountain trails across three continents. The film is now live on Bertelsmann India Investments' YouTube and LinkedIn channels.

About Bertelsmann India Investments

Founded in 2012, Bertelsmann India Investments (BII) is a sector-agnostic venture capital fund backing India's next generation of transformative business leaders. BII focuses on early growth stage startups (Series A to C), combining long-term capital with strategic partnership to help founders scale sustainably. With $500 million committed over the next five years, BII invests directly from Bertelsmann's balance sheet—deploying $5–15 million initially and up to $40 million across a company's lifecycle. Its portfolio includes leading innovators like Shiprocket, Eruditus, Licious, Nat Habit, and LetsTransport. As the India investment arm of Bertelsmann SE & Co. KGaA, BII leverages the strength of Bertelsmann Investments (BI), one of the world's largest VC ecosystems with $2 billion invested across 250+ companies globally.

About Kushaal Chawla:

An award-winning filmmaker, director, and producer, Kushaal is a Masters graduate of the New York Film Academy (LA). He has written, directed, and produced the Hollywood feature film "Another Time" (premiered at Warner Bros. Studios in Los Angeles, won 15 international awards, now streaming on Amazon Prime Video US, UK, and Germany). As a director and producer under his banner Dream Slate Pictures, Kushaal has led award-winning campaigns for top global brands, including his recent AI-powered Kellogg's campaign that entered the CANNES LIONS 2026.

About Dream Slate Pictures:

An award-winning global creative agency and production house, Dream Slate Pictures combines traditional tentpole global production expertise with next-generation AI-powered filmmaking capabilities. The company operates across feature films, TV shows, advertising, branded content, and original intellectual properties. Its client portfolio includes Kellogg's, LG Electronics, UNESCO, HP, Spotify, Zee World, and ABP News, among others. In 2026, Dream Slate Pictures was awarded Best Global Digital Marketing Campaign by Economic Times for their AI-powered work that entered CANNES LIONS 2026.