Possibly hearing footsteps from its rivals in the e-commerce logistics businesses, such as Amazon, United Parcel Service (UPS) has invested US$28 million in a new startup company called Deliv Inc., which specializes in performing same-day parcel delivery.
\nThe investment was made via the integrator\u2019s UPS Strategic Enterprise Fund, its Atlanta-based corporate venture arm. “We don’t participate in the on-demand business as much, and the consumer side of this is still a bit of a mystery to us,” Rimas Kapeskas, managing director of the UPS fund, told Reuters. “This is a rapidly evolving marketplace and we thought we could learn more by being close to it.\u201d
\nDeliv has been compared to the Uber ride-sharing service, in that it employs a fleet of crowd-sourced contract drivers, which allows the company to avoiding healthcare costs and other overhead concerns. For a fee, Deliv\u2019s drivers pick up online orders from retail stores and deliver them to customers on the day they are ordered. The startup sees this store-as-distribution-center model as away to compete with Amazon\u2019s popular Prime Now same-day package delivery service for certain orders.
\nSo far, Deliv has raised $40.5 million from investors including Upfront Ventures, RPM Ventures and mall operators, such as General Growth Properties. The company now operates in about 100 U.S. cities and handles last-mile delivery for various malls and retailers, including Macy’s, Kohl’s and Best Buy. UPS will take a minority stake in the California-based Deliv and take part in its board meetings, Reuters said.
\n“We are solving a different problem in the last mile,” Deliv CEO Daphne Carmeli told Reuters. UPS, she added, is \u201clooking to learn about growth in same-day delivery as we are interested to learn from their success.”
\nSource: aircargoworld<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"