Sendle's Sudden Shut Down
How a beloved Australian ecom logistics brand was killed
On Januray 11, 2026 customers of Sendle received an unexpected shock when an email arrived in their inbox indicating that “effective immediatly, Sendle will be halting all bookings for parcel pickup and delivery.”
While Sendle is not particularly well known in the US and has little European footprint, it was a highly regarded and beloved player in the shipping label aggregation space. Think of it as like one of the ShipStation’s or Parcel2Go’s for Australia.
Having raised more than $100M up till it’s Series-C round, and boasting a high market share in Australia while expanding in the US, customers and partners were understandably confused and sadded.
What happened to Sendle is a cautionary tale of deal making gone wrong.
FAST Group
Five months earlier on August 7, 2025, Sendle had announced a 3-way merger between themselves and two other US based logistics companies ACI Logistix and FirstMile. The merger was touted as creating a “dynamic ecosystem” for customers through synnergy from of the 3 businesses.
ACI Logistix had been in business for the past 60 years as national parcel logistics service provider with a strong history as a USPS reseller.
FirstMile was known for mid market solutions and provided national pickup infrastructure.
Combined with Sendle’s strong in-house technology and large SMB customer base, the merger made sense from marketing perspective.
(A fanfiction animation I created in VEO)
Cracks Start To Show
Within weeks of the merger, the group was short on cash. To salvage the situation, Sendle’s primary investor Federation Asset Management immediately injected $12M to keep the business operating while Fast Group attempted to raise as much as $60M in new financing.
Then on December 12, Federation Asset Management made a shocking discovery of their own, announcing that “Since the merger it has emerged that ACI Logistix was not current on its financial obligations at the time of the merge, contrary to representations made to Federation during the due diligence process.”
Among the discoveries: $20M owed to DoorDash, presumably for deliveries and not for take out.
In response, Federation froze additional withdrawals form it’s $100M Investment Fund II, which Fast Group was relying on for continued operating capital. Another investor in Sendle, Touch Ventures (ASX: TVL) immediately wrote down it’s $36M prior investment into Sendle to 0.
Unable to secure more funding to feed it’s cash hungry business, FAST’s board voted to wind down the company on Saturday January 10th, and by Sunday the 11th, Snedle’s email notice went out to customers.
What Really Happened
The tale of FAST Group is one of high stakes deal making from multiple parties gone terribly wrong.
On one hand, Sendle was a high growth VC backed startup taking a business risk that investing lots of money into it’s develping and growing business would create exit-worthy business.
Federation was the big money financial backer willing to pump tens of millions into this high risk venture in pursuit of VC like gains.
There is nothing wrong with this model whatsoever.
On the other hand, we have ACI Logistix. In light of the subsequent discoveries of the “significant deficiencies” in ACI’s financial statements, the question is whether the deficiencies were intentional misrepresentations or not. Was it incompetence, or was it the F-word?
Is it plauslabe that ACI Logistix, having previously been a major reseller of USPS, was several impacted by USPS’ decision to terminate reseller NSA’s (basically reseller rates) and end it’s DDP zone-skipping-enablement program?
Is it plausible that the $20M Door Dash payable is the result of ACI diverting shipments to whichever carrier could deliver ACI’s shipments, even if at a loss, as long as the carrier provided credit terms so that ACI could keep operating?
Is it plausible that ACI was drawn to Sendle largely in part of due to Federations deep pockets, which it had hoped would feel compelled to pump in any amount of cash necessary to save the combined FAST Group?
And the question that will probably be asked in a heated behind the scenes argument is: If Federation and Sendle had been aware of the true financial position, would they still have proceeded with the merger?
Lesson Learned
Logistics is not VC backable business. Logistics tech is VC backable, but the gray area is hybrid tech + ops. For every successful tech+ops case like Cainiao, there are 10 cases of tech+ops failures like Deliverr.
This won’t stop deal makers from trying, including the recently proposed $12B merger between Thoma Bravo’s Auctance and the WWEX group.
What Can Retailers Do Now
Fortunately Australian retailers who relied heavily on Sendle have several credible home grown alternatives to Sendle including Shippit, Interparcel, and StarShippit.
International players like Shipstation and Easyship are also available to use.
Sendle deserves credit for handling the situation in an orderly fashion.
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Strong piece on the due diligence failure here. The $20M DoorDash payable is especially revealing about ACI's cash flow issues being masked pre-merger. This reminds me of similar collapses in the space where operational deficits get papered over with carrier credit until the whole thing implodes.