Shiprocket Launches Shunya.ai: An AI-Powered Platform for Indian MSMEs and D2C Businesses

Shiprocket bets on AI to redefine commerce enablement for SMEs

Shiprocket is entering a new phase of growth with a strategic pivot toward becoming an AI-first commerce platform. Shiprocket is evolving from a purely digital e-commerce enabler to a full-scale commerce platform, targeting both online sellers and the vast network of about 20 million offline merchants across India. Saahil Goel, MD and CEO of Shiprocket says with a focus on hyperlocal deliveries and AI-led solutions, the company aims to power real-world retail just as seamlessly as it has digital. "Until now, Shiprocket has primarily served digital-first merchants -- sellers who operated entirely online without a physical storefront. But the next phase of our journey lies beyond just e-commerce. We're now turning our focus to the 20 million offline merchants across India -- local retailers, shop owners, and entrepreneurs -- who may not require our services for every transaction, but increasingly need fast, reliable logistics for the growing demand in hyperlocal commerce," says Goel. "Picture a toy shop in Lajpat Nagar wanting to deliver a product to his consumer within an hour. This is the kind of real-world, real-time commerce we aim to empower. While we continue to build AI-led products and enhance our digital backbone, our long-term vision over the next 5 to 10 years is clear: to become a full-spectrum commerce enabler -- not just an e-commerce operator," he adds. This shift, Goel says, opens a powerful new opportunity -- one where the company can walk into physical markets, engage merchants directly, and offer tailored solutions for their evolving logistics and fulfillment needs. The company also announced the launch of Shunya.ai, a multimodal AI engine purpose-built to serve the country's MSMEs and D2C businesses. Developed in partnership with Ultrasafe Inc. through a joint venture, Shunya.ai brings together voice, text, and image intelligence in over nine Indian languages built, trained, and hosted entirely within India. "This is not just AI made in India; it's AI made for India. We've adapted Shunya.ai from the ground up for Indian languages, commerce workflows, and MSME needs. By embedding it directly into our platform, we're giving over 1.5 lakh sellers instant access to tools that are intelligent, local, and scalable, leveling the playing field for businesses across Bharat," Goel said at the company's flagship commerce summit - Shiprocket SHIVIR 2025. Starting at just Rs 499 per month, Shunya.ai will be directly embedded into Shiprocket's seller panel and will power features like, bilingual product listings, ad creatives, and GST-compliant invoices; WhatsApp voice-to-order automation; Image-to-alt-text SEO optimisation and festival and regional sale recommendations. Shiprocket has expanded its credit offerings for merchants by launching an instant credit line. "We've partnered with a few NBFCs, integrating their underwriting systems directly into our platform," Goel said. "These NBFCs assess a merchant's data -- both from their own sources and from activity on our platform -- run their proprietary credit scoring models, and make lending decisions in real time. Unlike our earlier lending processes that took several days, this new setup enables merchants to access credit almost instantly." Goel adds that of everything the company announced today, the most transformative is its focus on AI. "The rest -- whether it's expanding our ecosystem, offering capital, or enabling quick commerce -- builds on what we've already been doing as an operating system for SMEs and e-commerce. But AI represents a fundamental shift. We're now working to become an AI-first company, and that's where much of our future direction lies. We'll continue to empower merchants, support retail, and drive commerce -- but the way we do it, and the way our merchants run their businesses, will be dramatically reshaped by AI," says Goel.

Shiprocket Unveils Shunya.ai To Help Businesses Streamline Supply Chain

Shunya.ai has entered into a strategic partnership with L&T- Cloudfiniti, leveraging its GPU-powered infrastructure IPO-bound logistics platform shiprocket has unveiled Shunya.ai, an agentic AI stack to support micro, small and medium enterprises (MSME) and D2C business by facilitating multilingual commerce. Notably, Shiprocket has launched Shunya.ai as a joint venture with Ultrasafe Enterprise. The AI-platform offers text, image and voice intelligence in more than nine Indian languages. Shunya.ai is built and trained entirely in India. Shunya.ai has entered into a strategic partnership with L&T- Cloudfiniti. This collaboration integrates L&T-Cloudfiniti's GPU-powered infrastructure to handle high performance AI workloads, ensuring all data remains stored within Indian borders. "This is not just Al made in India, it's Al made for India," said Saahil Goel, managing director and chief executive officer at Shiprocket. "We've adapted Shunya.ai from the ground up for Indian languages, commerce workflows, and MSME needs. By embedding it directly into our platform, we're giving over 1.5 Lakh sellers instant access to tools that are intelligent, local, and scalable, leveling the playing field for businesses across Bharat," he added.

Shiprocket's Shunya AI: What The E-Comm AI Shift Means For MSMEs

E-commerce logistics platform Shiprocket announced the launch of Shunya.ai, a sovereign AI model developed in India to support the country's Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs), on July 11. The company claims that it is India's first multimodal AI stack, built in partnership with US-based Ultrasafe Inc. This announcement comes at the heels of Shiprocket filing a confidential draft red herring prospectus (DHRP) with the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) in May 2025 for their Initial Public Offering (IPO). The company is expected to raise around Rs 2500 crore in its IPO. As per Shiprocket's website, Shunya.ai is built on a freemium model, with unlimited access priced at Rs 499 a month for MSMEs. It is directly integrated into the Shiprocket platform and offers AI agents across multiple languages. According to the company, the agents can perform the following tasks: Shiprocket CEO Saahil Goel stated, "We've adapted Shunya.ai from the ground up for Indian languages, commerce workflows, and MSME needs. By embedding it directly into our platform, we're giving over 1,50,000 sellers instant access to tools that are intelligent, local, and scalable, levelling the playing field for businesses across Bharat." Notably, Larsen and Toubro's AI cloud arm, Cloudfiniti is reportedly providing the underlying GPU infrastructure, ensuring that all data processing and storage remains within India. This AI model does offer multiple benefits but it will not level the playing field against big players, as per Devangshu Dutta who is the founder of specialist consulting firm, Third Eyesight. "While Shunya AI can help small businesses compete better, it won't completely level the playing field. Large companies still have greater organisational capacity and capability to respond to the insights offered, including more data and bigger budgets. The real benefit for small businesses is improving how they work and serve customers within their current markets, rather than suddenly competing with giants," Dutta said. This is not the first time that an Indian e-commerce platform has unveiled a B2B AI service through its existing platform. Zepto recently launched Zepto Atom in May 2025, a real-time tool that offers consumer brands available on the platform minute-level updates, PIN-code level performance maps, and Zepto GPT, a Natural Language Processing (NLP) assistant trained on internal data that brands can query about their stock keeping units (SKUs) and performance data. Zomato and its e-commerce arm Blinkit have also been growing their AI capabilities. Analytics India Magazine previously reported that the company's generative AI team has grown from 3 to 20 engineers in the time-span of a year. Zomato introduced a personalised AI food assistant for users, and also uses AI in its backend to optimise delivery times and improve consumer support. Blinkit also released the Recipe Rover AI in May 2023, an AI assistant for recipes. Other companies like Swiggy with 'What to Eat' AI, Myntra's MyFashionGPT AI shopping assistant, and Amazon's Rufus have also adopted AI assistants on their platform as a tool for the consumer. Dutta asserts that this shift means platforms like Zepto and Shiprocket are changing from being service providers to becoming data intelligence companies. They are generating, or are in the process of generating revenue through transactional data that flows through the company. "While this can create better insights and automation for merchants on these platforms, it also could make the merchants more dependent on the platforms. Once a merchant builds its operations around a platform's specific AI tools and insights, it becomes much harder to switch to a competitor - creating stronger merchant stickiness. We already see this in infrastructure and core services such as banking and financial services, enterprise cloud services, building management etc. and the same is likely to happen in AI-enabled process management", he said. As Shiprocket is preparing for an IPO, Shunya.ai becomes another means to generate revenue for the company. This app can extend Shiprocket's reach to local physical stores and MSMEs, by offering them the opportunity to provide the same experiences and support to the consumer that larger retailers and e-commerce platforms do, while automating delivery automation, cataloguing, and customer support. Furthermore, the launch of this model is also part of the larger trend of AI integration and automation, both within e-commerce platforms for their consumers and within the back-end for optimisation. Competition in these sectors and merchant stickiness may also become an issue, as businesses hosted on these e-commerce services may become reliant on specific AI tools and their outputs. Questions of data privacy are also important when it comes to service companies moving towards data intelligence: How do these AI models gather and use data? The consent of end-consumers in these B2B models, data storage, and security are all issues that need to be studied as e-commerce and retails pivots towards AI. MediaNama has reached out to Shiprocket with the following questions and will update the article when we receive a response. 1. How does Shunya AI differentiate itself from other global or domestic AI tools being used in the logistics and e-commerce sectors such as Zepto Atom or Shopify Magic? 2. What data is Shunya AI trained on? Is the training dataset sourced exclusively from Shiprocket's operations, or are third-party data streams also used? 3. What data will Shunya AI's marketing campaign models access? How will it ensure privacy and data protection of the end consumer of the business who is using these models? 4. How does Shiprocket ensure compliance with Indian data protection laws, especially given the scale of customer and seller data being used?