In India’s fast-evolving logistics landscape, scale alone is no longer a differentiator. Precision, resilience, intelligence, and speed define leadership. At the heart of this transformation is Delhivery, a company that has steadily built one of the country’s most sophisticated logistics networks. In this in-depth interaction, Nikhil Vij, Senior Vice President & Head of Product, Delhivery, reflects on the company’s evolution, from its early e-commerce parcel roots to a diversified logistics powerhouse and explains how data, cloud, automation, and AI are shaping the future of movement in India. What emerges is a story of deliberate complexity, deep technological investment, and a culture that believes every operational decision must be powered by intelligence.
From e-Commerce origins to a multi-business logistics platform
Delhivery’s journey began with a sharp focus on e-commerce parcel delivery, an industry that was just beginning to scale in India. Over time, this focus evolved into a broader ambition – to build a nationwide transportation and supply chain backbone that could serve multiple segments.
“Our core business in the early years was e-commerce parcel delivery,” says Nikhil Vij. “Even today, a large portion of our business continues to come from e-commerce, where consumers shop online and we handle everything from first mile pickup to last mile delivery, including prepaid, cash on delivery, reverse pickup, RTO, and next-day remittance.”
This early focus helped the company build strong foundations in speed, tracking, and operational discipline. But around 2015-16, Delhivery made a strategic expansion into PTL (Part Truckload), a business-to-business segment that was traditionally fragmented and price-sensitive.
“The idea was simple. Line haul gets optimised when you move more load. The more volume you pump into a network, the more economies of scale you generate,” adds Vij.
The advantage Delhivery carried into PTL was significant – a wide national reach already built for e-commerce, a faster-than-industry network, and end-to-end tracking backed by a mature technology stack.
Over time, PTL became the company’s second-largest business. Together with express parcel, these segments account for over 80% of revenue. Beyond that, Delhivery operates in full truckload (FTL), cross-border logistics, intra-city delivery, and supply chain services, where warehousing integrates tightly with its transportation network.
“Transportation remains the core of our revenue, tech investments, and product efforts,” notes Vij. “Increasingly, we are also investing deeply in warehousing systems that power our supply chain services.”
Technology as the operating system of the network
For Delhivery, technology is not a support function, it is the operating system of the network.
“The biggest asset we have is the network. And right after that, it’s the technology that runs the network,” asserts Vij.
From the beginning, Delhivery adopted a deeply data-driven culture. Every shipment, partner, vehicle, hub, and route generates structured data. This philosophy intensified when the company transitioned from working with third-party co-loaders to running its own line haul operations around the year 2016-17.
Suddenly, variables that were previously abstract became mission-critical, including vehicle utilisation, turnaround time, yard waiting time, route delays, breakdown frequency, and dock loading efficiency.
“For almost two and a half years after launching PTL, more than 50% of our tech and product bandwidth went into building systems to manage this shift. The payoff was a granular, real-time understanding of network performance that few logistics providers globally possess,” recalls Vij.
Technology investments are powerful only when matched by culture. At Delhivery, the instinct is always to ask for more granular data.
Vij further explains, “If we can capture more data and make better decisions, the question is never ‘let’s simplify.’ The question is how do we get that data and improve further? This mindset permeates operations. Even field teams demand richer datasets to optimise service quality.”
Designing for optimality, not simplicity
Many companies simplify networks to reduce operational complexity. Delhivery chose the opposite path. “People tend to run away from complex networks,” Vij observes. “We have taken the approach that you must build the most efficient network possible. If complexity comes with it, technology must solve it.”
This philosophy manifests in multiple ways. India’s addressing system presents unique challenges. PIN codes cover large areas. Many customers don’t know their exact PIN codes. Written addresses are often inconsistent. To solve this, Delhivery built a proprietary geocoding stack that converts textual addresses into precise latitude-longitude coordinates.
“The ability to convert address into lat-long accurately allows us to route shipments to the correct last mile centre,” says Vij.
This became even more important as Delhivery moved closer to customers by shrinking delivery catchment areas, breaking PIN codes into smaller service zones, reducing last-mile costs, which is the largest cost component in e-commerce logistics. What might have been operationally chaotic instead became mathematically optimised for the company.
Building a dense mesh network
Traditional logistics networks follow a hub-and-spoke model. Delhivery evolved into a dense mesh network.
“In a typical setup, Mumbai might send all north-bound load to Delhi, and from Delhi it goes elsewhere,” Vij points out. “In our case, Mumbai connects directly to multiple nodes.”
This introduces routing complexity but delivers lower handling costs, faster movement, reduced dependency on single hubs, and redundancy and resilience. Today, most origin-destination pairs have three to four possible routes with similar delivery timelines. If one route faces disruption like road construction, weather, or congestion, others can compensate.
“The system absorbs the complexity. Operators don’t have to think about it every time. They just scan, and the system decides,” says Vij.
Cloud as foundational infrastructure
Unlike legacy logistics firms, Delhivery was born in the cloud era. “Cloud was never really a debate for us,” Vij states. “We wanted to focus on business logic, intelligence, and data, not on maintaining servers.”
As one of the largest users of AWS in India, Delhivery leverages cloud infrastructure for elastic scalability, real-time data processing, distributed system reliability, and experimentation with new services.
“Cloud providers abstract away infrastructure risk. We see ourselves similarly for our customers, wherein we take away logistics complexity so they can focus on their business,” highlights Vij.
AI and Gen AI – from efficiency to intelligence
While structured data has long powered Delhivery’s systems, AI has unlocked new value from unstructured inputs. One of the most visible impacts has been in customer service.
“A significant portion of queries were basic – ‘where is my shipment?’ But more nuanced queries required contextual analysis like delays, recovery, expected timelines. AI allows us to analyse shipment data instantly and respond reliably. The quality is consistent and response times are faster,” adds Vij.
This automation frees human agents to handle complex, high-stakes cases like urgent medicine deliveries requiring rerouting via air.
Similarly, damage and loss claims once required manual investigation and cross-referencing. Now, large parts of that process are automated. Only 10% to 25% of complex cases require deeper human intervention. The result is faster resolution for genuine shippers and improved experience across marketplaces.
Delhivery is also increasingly leveraging AI to interpret voice and visual data. For instance, an attempted delivery may fail due to nuanced customer feedback over phone, a new rider may misclassify the reason, or an AI-powered call analysis interprets the conversation and determines the next best action.
“Instead of training tens of thousands of people to categorise perfectly, we listen, interpret, and decide the next step intelligently,” asserts Vij.
Similarly, CCTV feeds across hubs are being analysed to detect service gaps, congestion, and operational inefficiencies. By correlating this with shipment data and even weather information, the company can flag and resolve issues faster.
Vij believes that it’s about speeding up diagnosis and decision-making. Execution will still involve people but intelligence accelerates recovery.
Automation at scale
Automation is deeply embedded in Delhivery’s mega gateways. “We are one of the most automated logistics players in India by a large margin,” Vij states.
From high-speed sorters to automated routing systems, hardware and software integration ensures throughput at scale. Configuration updates are often software-driven, allowing rapid adaptation to network changes.
Beyond physical automation, Delhivery is investing in emerging areas such as drones and next-generation transportation systems , thus extending its experimentation beyond conventional ground logistics.
From operator to platform – the SaaS evolution
Years of operating and optimising its own network have generated intellectual property that extends beyond logistics execution.
Recognising this, Delhivery launched its SaaS offering, an AI-powered transport management system designed for large manufacturers and brands.
“The learnings from building and running our network are difficult for pure software players to replicate,” Vij says. “We have built an autonomous AI-driven transport management system that encapsulates that experience.”
This marks a strategic evolution, from being purely a logistics operator to becoming a technology platform provider.
Deep focus on cybersecurity and data privacy
In logistics, data sensitivity is high. Shipment data includes customer names, addresses, and phone numbers. “If people cannot trust you with their data, the business itself becomes questionable,” Vij emphasises.
Delhivery’s approach focuses on architectural safeguards rather than just process controls. For example, phone numbers are masked by default, access to raw customer data is tightly restricted, and system design prevents easy extraction of sensitive information.
“We don’t rely only on processes. We ensure the access itself isn’t available,” adds Vij.
As digital fraud and data breaches become more common globally, Delhivery continuously upgrades its security posture, treating cybersecurity as foundational infrastructure.
What lies ahead
As India’s logistics ecosystem evolves, with rising e-commerce penetration, increasing B2B formalisation, and growing demand for real-time visibility, Delhivery’s trajectory suggests a future defined not merely by physical scale, but by intelligence density.
For the organisation, AI will deepen, automation will expand, networks will grow denser, SaaS platforms will scale, and cybersecurity will remain non-negotiable.
At its core, Delhivery’s transformation underscores a broader truth about modern logistics, wherein movement is no longer just about trucks and warehouses. It is about data, algorithms, and decisions taken every few seconds across thousands of nodes.
In engineering that system, deliberately embracing complexity and converting it into efficiency, Delhivery is not just delivering parcels; it is delivering a blueprint for the next generation of logistics in India.
“We don’t design networks to make them easy to operate,” Vij concludes. “We design them to be optimal and then we build technology to make that complexity manageable.”