Ecom Express enters Bangladesh with Paperfly bet

Gurugram headquartered Ecom Express, which provides end-to-end logistics solutions, on Tuesday announced an investment of $11 million in Bangladesh’s third-party e-commerce logistics firm called Paperfly.

Through this investment, Ecom Express has entered Bangladesh, marking its maiden venture outside India. 

"The market draws parallel with India in terms of growth and demography and we want to leverage our experience and domain expertise to enable high scalability growth and build a strategic backbone of e-commerce logistics in Bangladesh. We look forward to enabling Paperfly to unlock new avenues for an enhanced third-party logistics and home delivery in the country,” TA Krishnan, CEO and co-founder of Ecom Express said in a statement. 

Founded in 2016 by Shahriar Hasan, Md. Razibul Islam, Rahath Ahmed and Shamsuddin Ahmed, Paperfly is a technology-enabled logistics company in Bangladesh covering all 64 districts. It enables ecommerce platforms with full-fledged delivery and logistics offering and services including last mile delivery, cash on delivery solutions and returns management. 

The investments will be used by Paperfly towards transformation of logistics through intelligence driven automations and data sciences, the statement said. 

It will further accelerate the company’s implementation of advanced supply chain and logistics processes, agile solutions in delivery and warehouse management, and other operational facets in the logistics and supply chain. 

Founded in 2012, Ecom Express works with ecommerce companies including Amazon, Flipkart, Paytm and Udaan to provide express delivery and fulfilment services. It also works with telcos and banking and financial services players for e-KYC and document collection. 

The company has a pan India presence and operates in over 2650 towns across 27,000 plus pin codes. 

Last month, Swiss global private equity firm Partners Group said it will invest $250 million (Rs 1,841 crore) in Ecom Express.

Prior to that, the company had raised $36 million from CDC group in December 2019. The CDC investment came two years after New York-headquartered private equity investor Warburg Pincus bet $30 million on the company as part of a “supplemental agreement” in 2017.