A West Delhi unicorn: Shiprocket’s Saahil Goel on the long road to building India’s logistics backbone

When Saahil Goel says, “We have renamed ourselves as Shiprocket,” he is not talking about the rebranding of the cosmetics brand. He talks about a moment when a 14-year-old company finally realized what it really was and what it wanted to build.

“I think it was the first time the whole company felt it,” he says. For the first time, there was a common belief throughout the organization that the business had found its direction. Goel was talking to LiveMint Deputy Editor Abhishek Singh about Mint’s popular series Rollin’ with the Boss. Watch the full episode below,

This collective sense of clarity did not emerge early. This comes after years of false starts, uncomfortable turns, and learning (mostly the hard way) that things don’t scale in India. e-commerce ecosystem. Today, Shiprocket powers hundreds of thousands of businesses and is behind a significant share of India’s online commerce. But its origins lie somewhere very different: a childhood in Punjab Bagh, a fascination with computers and the internet, which was still in its infancy.

Being a “computer guy”

Goel describes himself without hesitation as a Bagh boy from Punjab. His first encounter with technology took place at home, not in the classroom. Her mother, who was tech-savvy for her time, taught her how to use FoxBase, an old database program. When Goel was in eighth grade, there was a computer at home and Goel taught him how to build simple systems.

According to the ninth standard, he discovered HTML. This was the late 1990s, when the internet was still open and largely unstructured. He instinctively gravitated towards this subject and soon became the school’s computer student, working on the school’s website, helping his friends solve problems and constantly experimenting.

In Grade 11, he and a friend started a prank website and monetized it with banner ads. The site was eventually listed as the number one prank site on Rediff, attracting around 100,000 visitors a month.

They earned about $1,000, a significant amount at the time. Money was important, but more importantly, the experience stayed with him. The Internet was no longer abstract. It can be built, shared and monetized.

US years and withdrawal

Goel, who was torn between India and the USA after university, met Gautam Kapoor, who would later become his co-founder. The two spent their time discussing ideas and problems, not discussing formal business plans. Kapoor was an extremely resourceful and operationally sharp person; he often found ways to execute where others hesitated.

The partnership worked because their strengths were complementary. While Goel brought product and technology thinking, Kapoor brought execution and on-the-ground insight.

After graduation, Goel worked at Max before returning to the US for his MBA and MS. He worked in various organizations but something went wrong. “I was working in technology, but that’s not my calling,” he says. Even then it was clear that he wanted to start a venture of his own.

Talks with Kapoor began around 2009, but the timing was wrong. Indian e-commerce was still in its infancy. “Timing is extremely important,” says Goel. There was no clear formula for knowing when the time would be right. They tested ideas, trusted their instincts, and waited.

We’re going back and starting small

It wasn’t logistics that ultimately drew Goel back to India. It was websites.

Family members were turning to him for help creating websites. He assumed there would be a Shopify-like solution in India. There wasn’t. DIY infrastructure was not available and this gap was glaring.

It was not easy to convince his wife to return from the USA. Goel remembers framing it as limited risk: A few years to try to build something meaningful, with the option to roll back if it didn’t work out.

They moved back in January 2012. Kapoor had already set up a small office; A shop in Jasola that belonged to Goel’s father and was lying unused. The rent was: ₹5,000 per month. they came together ₹10 lakh each.

“If you want to start a business, treat it like a business,” says Goel.

The first version of the company was a store builder, later called CartRocket. Over the course of three years, they signed up nearly 1,000 sellers, paying a modest monthly fee. Goel realized that the problem was not survival. This was the scale. The business may grow gradually, but it will never grow large enough to justify the passion behind it.

Learning what doesn’t work

The initial thesis was inspired by Shopify: simplify enterprise software for small businesses, then add payments and shipping. But India acted differently.

“India is not website first,” says Goel.

By 2014-15, commercial conversations were already taking place on social media. The critical layers, payments and shipping, refused to proceed cleanly. Logistics companies were skeptical of e-commerce, and cash on delivery was widely seen as unfeasible.

Once again, the company found itself early.

Every time the company ran out of money, it started spinning. CartRocket didn’t shut down, but it did stop. It was expertly pursued; A marketplace targeting long-tail sellers with built-in payments and shipping. This stage turned out to be very important. It revealed the real problem.

For small sellers logistics were unreliable. Reception was inconsistent. Delays hurt everyone, merchants, platforms, and consumers. Yields were high and margins thin because most orders were cash on delivery. Goel realized that shipping wasn’t an afterthought. It was an experience.

understanding of logistics

By 2016-17 the definition of the problem was clear. Shipping should have been treated like payments, a core layer rather than a background job. “When we realized that shipping was an important part of the e-commerce transaction, we built it in a way that had never been done before,” says Goel.

The inspiration came from payment gateways: a single platform that connects multiple providers, is accessible to small businesses, and eliminates operational complexity. For businesses selling independently through websites or social media, delivery was as important as discovery and conversion. In physical retail, delivery is immediate. Online business needed to recreate trust in a different way.

“If you remove delivery, the customer won’t buy,” explains Goel. This realization led to the company’s second biggest and most decisive turning point. The company was rebranded as Shiprocket. For the first time, the entire organization felt in sync.

We are building infrastructure, not exaggeration

Goel says the vision never changes: to enable MSMEs in India to go digital. What changed was the understanding of how. He argues that India is structurally different from the US or China. Retail is fragmented. MSMEs are the largest employers. Marketplaces alone cannot absorb the entire economy.

Shiprocket’s approach is to empower individual sellers who sell through websites, WhatsApp, Instagram or multiple channels by managing payments, fraud checks, shipping and cash collection through a single platform. The model is result-oriented. The software is free. Shiprocket wins when merchants win. “This is like building infrastructure for India,” says Goel. “It’s a very satisfying goal as long as you can find money to work around it.”

Scale

Today, Shiprocket supports nearly 200,000 businesses at a paid-to-employment rate. Works ₹25,000–30,000 crore annually in GMV. It powers roughly 4.5-5% of India’s total e-commerce and around 20-25% of direct trade.

More than half of its deliveries go to tier 2 cities. Over time, Shiprocket has delivered to approximately 140 million people Consumers make up roughly 55% of India’s shopping population.

Average order value on the platform is approx. ₹1,500 and Goel is seeing a new wave of customers, mostly from small towns, shopping online for the first time.

“It’s like we’ve been waiting for this for 14 years,” he says.

beyond work

As the conversation moves away from logistics, Goel begins to think. She talks about parenting, living with her parents, and how raising children has made her a better manager by teaching her patience and perspective. He thanks his wife Neha for making his journey possible. “There’s no way I could do this” without her support, he says. She runs the house while he builds the company.

Music remains his mainstay. The artist, a former band member and Metallica fan, currently plays with his daughter, who plays guitar. “The only thing I can focus on for hours is music,” he says.

When asked about work-life balance, Goel completely dismisses the idea. He prefers integration. “You can’t compartmentalize,” he says. “You’re at work, you need to do something for your child. Do it. Come back.”

He believes that property applies equally to business and family.

stay here

Shiprocket filed its DRHP, signaling plans to go public. Goel doesn’t go into detail beyond that. The focus, as always, is on the long term.

“We won’t sell this business for five years,” he says. “We’re in this forever.”

The journey from Punjabi Bagh to building India’s logistics infrastructure took 14 years. It involved being early, being wrong, and staying long enough to learn.

Sometimes that’s enough to build something permanent.