Peter Thiel's Valar Ventures-backed Velocity Commits ₹100 Cr to Scale AI-Led Shipping, Targets 5X Growth in 2026

Velocity, India’s leading e-commerce enablement platform has announced a ₹100 crore investment to scale Velocity Shipping (formerly Shipfast), as it doubles down on advancing faster, more reliable and transparent AI-led logistics for digital-first brands. The investment will be deployed over the next 2 years and will be funded entirely through internal cash reserves and revenues from Velocity’s core businesses.

Since its launch in 2025, Velocity Shipping has seen strong adoption, with 900+ brands onboarded so far, with around 60% of these coming from Velocity’s existing ecosystem. The platform is currently witnessing 70% month-on-month growth in order volumes and now contributes nearly 40% of Velocity’s overall revenues. In December 2025 alone, Velocity Shipping processed over 10 lakh orders, placing Velocity among India’s top three shipping aggregators by order volume.

To support this momentum, the ₹100 crore investment will be directed toward strategic hiring, product development, and AI-led innovation across the logistics value-chain. Velocity plans to double its shipping team and has already made senior hires from NimbusPost, Pickrr, Delhivery and Shiprocket as it strengthens its shipping and last-mile capabilities. The company is also targeting a 5x increase in monthly shipping volumes in CY26.

“We started Velocity by solving one of the biggest bottlenecks for digital-first brands: access to capital. As we worked closely with thousands of founders, it became clear that logistics and fulfilment were equally critical constraints to growth, but existing solutions needed to evolve to better support digital-first brands. Velocity Shipping was built as a strong, operator-first alternative to existing shipping solutions, with reliability and accountability at its core,” said Abhiroop Medhekar, Co-Founder and CEO, Velocity.

“Its rapid adoption has reinforced our belief in shipping as a major growth engine for Velocity. This ₹100 crore commitment reflects our long-term conviction to double down on shipping as we build category-defining digital infrastructure for India's e-commerce ecosystem,” Medhekar added.

Logistics has become a Growth Bottleneck for D2C Brands

Rising consumer expectations around delivery speed have fundamentally reshaped how digital-first brands compete online. Faster Shipping directly impacts purchase completion, customer experience, delivery performance and repeat purchases. Yet brands were expected to deal with missed pickups, fake delivery attempts, slow escalations and delayed COD settlements -often shrugged off as ‘industry reality’.

This gap has tangible business consequences for D2C businesses, directly impacting growth and customer trust. According to the E-Commerce Trends Report 2025 by DHL eCommerce, 81% of shoppers abandon their carts if their preferred delivery option isn’t available.

Velocity Shipping was co-created with brands from Velocity’s own portfolio to address these challenges through a tech-first, transparent approach to logistics.

How Velocity Shipping fills the gap

Velocity Shipping enables same-day, next-day, express and standard deliveries helping brands meet rising consumer expectations without adding operational complexity. The platform works with multiple third-party logistics (3PL) partners, including Delhivery, Ekart, Amazon, Blue Dart, Blitz, Pikndel and XpressBees, allowing brands to access the best-performing courier networks across regions through a single interface and and serves over 19,000 pincodes pan-India.

A central differentiation in how the platform solves long-standing inefficiencies across the shipping lifecycle is its AI-powered intervention layer, which operates across the entire order journey. The system validates addresses, uses local-language voice agents (Vani AI developed by Velocity’s in-house tech team) to urge the conversion of COD orders to prepaid, and automatically verifies non-delivery reports. When a shipment is marked as an NDR or RTO, the system automatically triggers an AI call to the customer to verify the issue, helping identify false delivery attempts or premature returns.

AI-led calling helps solve failed deliveries and reduce RTO’s

Orders verified via WhatsApp and AI-led calls are delivered at 1.85x the rate of unverified orders, based on over 2.4 lakh AI-assisted verification calls completed on the platform. This proactive intervention with the platform has achieved 60-70% recovery of failed deliveries where the buyer is still interested and a 8-10 percentage point reduction in return-to-origin rates, directly impacting both customer experience and brand profitability for digital-first brands.

Velocity Shipping also tackles one of the biggest pain points in logistics for digital-first businesses: transparency and opacity in shipping aggregation models. In traditional models, weight discrepancies raised by courier partners often result in automatic deductions, with brands left to reconcile charges later. Velocity Shipping reverses this approach. Billing adjustments are made only after an AI-led verification of sorter images supplied by the courier partners, ensuring discrepancies are reviewed, validated, and resolved transparently.

Founded in 2020, Velocity has evolved into a full-stack growth enablement platform for digital-first brands across capital, logistics, insights and AI-led solutions. Its financing business is expected to turn profitable in CY26.

About Velocity

Velocity is India’s leading e-commerce enablement platform, empowering digital-first businesses with fast, flexible non-dilutive capital, logistics, and AI-powered tools to scale efficiently. Founded in 2020 by IIT Bombay alumni Abhiroop Medhekar, Atul Khichariya, and Saurav Swaroop, Velocity’s mission is to accelerate the growth of India’s e-commerce ecosystem.

Backed by Peter Thiel's Valar Ventures, Velocity has raised $30+ Million so far and has partnered with 4,000+ D2C and digital-first brands, disbursing over ₹1,100 crore in funding. Beyond capital, the company offers a comprehensive suite of products—Velocity Shipping for AI-driven shipping and logistics, Velocity Insights for actionable business intelligence and Vani AI, an AI-powered telecalling solution for personalized customer engagement. Some of the leading D2C brands Velocity has supported include Frido, Bellavita, Koskii, Bewakoof, Soulflower, Rynox Gears, NasherMiles, Hammer, Zlade, The Bear House, Off Duty, and Chumbak.

For more information, visit: https://www.velocity.in/