Sendle
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
Sendle was an Australian courier-aggregator startup founded in 2014 by James Chin Moody and Craig Davis. It positioned itself as the challenger to Australia Post for small businesses: a middleman between SMEs and major carrier networks like Aramex and Couriers Please, offering flat-rate pricing, free tracking, no subscription fees and carbon-neutral delivery. Over a decade it shipped more than 65 million parcels across three countries and raised over $100 million — including a $45 million Series C in 2021 at the COVID e-commerce peak and a $16 million round in 2024.
02 / Sendle FAILURE REASONS
Failure factors supported by the current evidence
Sendle's 2025 combination with two US logistics businesses created FAST Group, but the merged group unraveled within months. FAST Group's board then resolved to wind down operations, taking Sendle into shutdown and liquidation.
The cross-border combination that formed FAST Group did not produce a sustainable operating group and unraveled within months.
FAST Group's board resolved to wind down the merged company, which ended Sendle's operations.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Merger
Sendle combined with ACI Logistix and FirstMile to form FAST Group.
- Operations halted
FAST Group's board resolved in January to wind down the company, and Sendle stopped accepting bookings.
- Liquidation
Sendle entered liquidation in February 2026.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / AFTERMATH
Lessons
Sendle's lesson is about merger risk: a company can be healthy at home and still be destroyed by the governance of the group it joins. The FAST Group merger multiplied risk instead of diversifying it — one partner's accounting irregularities froze funding, and the wind-down decision at the parent level forced an overnight shutdown of the Australian operation. Local operators folded into international vehicles inherit the whole vehicle's balance sheet, not just its synergies.