Micro fulfillment powering ultrafast delivery
Sebastian Mejia, co-founder of Rappi, on building for multi-verticality in on-demand
Micro fulfillment turns Rappi from a dispatcher of other stores into the operator of its own neighborhood inventory, which is where delivery speed and margins start to improve at the same time. Instead of sending a courier to shop a partner store aisle by aisle, Rappi can pre position fast moving items near demand, pick them faster, shorten routes, and raise order density off the same courier base and customer traffic already built in convenience and grocery.
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This changes the logistics model from point to point into hub and spoke. That matters because marketplace delivery gets better mainly by stacking more drops per trip, while dark stores add another layer of efficiency by controlling where inventory sits and how it is picked and packed.
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The dark store play also changes where gross profit comes from. A marketplace mostly earns take rate on another merchant’s sale, while a vertically integrated store can buy inventory directly, avoid distributor markups, and keep more of the basket economics if order values are large enough.
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Rappi had an unusual starting advantage versus ultrafast specialists like Gopuff and JOKR. It already had demand across food, convenience, and grocery, plus an active courier network, so a micro fulfillment node could be layered onto an existing app habit instead of needing a new customer behavior from scratch.
The next step is using these nodes as the physical backbone for a broader super app. As density rises, the same neighborhood infrastructure can support more categories, better in stock rates, and more frequent ordering, which makes ultrafast delivery less like a promotional feature and more like a durable operating advantage.