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Days ago, I wrote about the Shadowfax IPO and how ~50% of business comes from Meesho. My DMs blew up asking for an analysis on Shiprocket as well 😅😅 Ended up speaking to a bunch of current/former leaders there and learned a ton. Sharing all I learned below. .. See, the story began with a "failure" a decade ago. In 2012, the founders launched KartRocket - “Shopify for India." But, it didn't scale. The "nice-to-have" storefront wasn't the real problem. The real problem? The broken, fragmented infra for shipping, returns, & COD. So in 2017, they pivoted to Shiprocket - going to the "foundations" - logistics. But they did it with a critical, asset-light decision: don't own the trucks or warehouses, and rather aggregating platforms like Delhivery, Shadowfax etc. This low-capex model gave them flexibility and massive operating leverage. That model aggregated ~4lac merchants and let them evolve into a true OS. And the crux of it falls into three pillars. .. 1. The Compounding Data Moat The shipping layer is NOT just a shipping business. It's a data acquisition engine that creates a powerful network effect. It analyzes data from millions of end consumers & hundreds of millions of transactions (processing ~4.5bn API hits/month). This massive dataset is the "fuel." .. 2. The AI-Driven "Co-Pilot" This "fuel" powers an AI co-pilot that optimizes the entire journey: Pre-fills shipping addresses at check out, slashing cart abandonment Predicts odds of returns before an item ships to block COD fraud Auto-contacts customers via WhatsApp/SMS after a failed delivery to reschedule instantly .. 3. The "Plug-and-Play" M&A Masterstroke They built this as an open, interoperable OS. Instead of building for years, their M&A spree was all "plug-and-play". - First came Wigzo (now Engage 360). It tracks prepurchase intent: what pages you browse, what ads you click, what's in your cart. Shiprocket's data is post-purchase outcome: RTO history, COD usage. - This gave them a 360-view data asset on the end-consumer, enabling merchants do things like: "Offer a discount ONLY to cart abandoners who also have a 100% successful delivery history." - Then came Omuni. This connects a brand's OFFLINE physical store inventory to the digital ecosystem. That allows a brand like Bata manage hundreds of its retail outlets as mini-fulfillment centers, so an online order in Shillong can be fulfilled by the nearest store, not a central warehouse in Delhi. This is the asset-light model (no trucks, no new warehouses). They set out to build something like Shopify back then - today, they’ve evolved into the broader commerce OS powering India end-to-end. Eagerly waiting for the IPO papers to be released, so I can dive all in on the deeper details. But a great lot of learning for me over the last few days. Anyhow, did you know all of this?