Ninja Van is Dying.
And it has nobody to blame but itself.
A Singapore unicorn raised over a billion dollars, built technology that changed how Southeast Asia ships parcels, and is now bleeding volume to a competitor it cannot out-price. I was a Ninja Van customer for over a decade. Here is what actually happened, and what every founder should take from it.
Every great company starts with a frustrated founder.
Lai Chang Wen did not set out to build a logistics company. He quit his derivatives trading job at Barclays to start Marcella, a men's custom menswear brand. Orders came in. Then the problems started. Local couriers were slow, unreliable, and impossible to track properly. His customers were frustrated. He was frustrated.
So he did what frustrated founders do. He built the solution himself.
In 2014, he and two co-founders pooled money to buy a second-hand van and started Ninja Van. Not as a logistics empire. As a fix for a problem he lived personally.
When timing and execution align, the numbers get absurd.
Ninja Van's timing was near perfect. Southeast Asian e-commerce was exploding. Every platform needed a reliable last-mile partner. Ninja Van was tech-first in a space full of old-school players, and they scaled fast.
The funding followed: Series A, B, C, D, E. Over a billion dollars raised in total, with backers including Alibaba Group, B Capital, DPDgroup, and a Brunei sovereign wealth fund. By 2021 they were a unicorn valued at over a billion dollars with operations across six markets: Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, and Vietnam. At their peak they were delivering millions of parcels a day for partners including Lazada, Shopee, and Tokopedia.
Building and scaling a platform business to this level, from a second-hand van to a billion-dollar regional operation, is genuinely impressive. Most founders never get close to this. Chang Wen and his team deserve full credit for what they built.
But scale is not the same as staying relevant.
Growth hides a lot of bad decisions. Until it stops.
As Ninja Van scaled, something quietly shifted. The focus moved toward large enterprise clients and platform volume. The small online seller shipping fifty parcels a week started feeling it. Service reliability became inconsistent. Support got harder to reach. The product stopped improving at the pace it once did.
Chasing big accounts is not obviously wrong. Volume customers drive efficiency and the unit economics make sense on paper. But in a marketplace model where small sellers make up a huge portion of total parcel count, losing their loyalty compounds. They talk to each other. They switch together.
And they did.
I was their customer for over ten years. Here is what actually happened.
I ran Vivre Activewear's logistics on Ninja Van for over a decade. At their best, they offered same-day pickup with proper 3-hour slots. I would pick a window, create my orders before the cutoff, and they would come. I could keep adding orders right up until the rider arrived. That flexibility shaped my entire outbound workflow.
Then things changed. Pickup windows shifted to 9am to 10pm. I had to create orders before 12am the previous night, and even then pickup was not guaranteed. More expensive. Less predictable. I adapted by consolidating to Monday and Friday dispatches only so I was not paying for pickup on low-volume days.
The billing situation made it worse. At some point they changed bank accounts and I found myself having to pay an $80 fee to transfer from my DBS business account. I wrote in to complain. They eventually added a PayNow option, which made me wonder if the fix had just been sitting there waiting for someone to complain loudly enough. Then it was manual key-in of UEN, amount, and reference every single invoice. Account managers rotated regularly and institutional knowledge left with each one.
I did not want to switch. I had over a decade of operations built around how Ninja Van worked. Switching costs are real. So I stayed longer than I should have.
SPX Express cold-emailed me three times through May 2026. On the third one I actually looked at the numbers. $2.60 versus $3.90 plus GST plus a platform surcharge that appeared somewhere along the way. No minimum volume. Same-day pickup if I create before 2pm. I switched. It took less than an hour to rebuild my ops around SPX, and a big part of that was vibe coding the integration in one sitting.
Over a decade of loyalty, undone in an afternoon. That is not Ninja Van losing a customer. That is Ninja Van failing the basic job of making it harder to leave than to stay.
They called themselves a tech company. The product tells a different story.
Ninja Van built its entire identity on being technology-first in a traditional industry. That positioning was their edge, their pitch to investors, their recruiting hook.
But tech companies stagnate too. When fundraising slows and pressure shifts from growth to survival, innovation is usually the first casualty. The features stop shipping. The product freezes. And then, worse than freezing, they start removing features. The same-day flexible pickup slots that made them genuinely useful for small sellers? Gone.
Their monthly invoice had no dynamic QR code for payment. A basic convenience any developer could add in an afternoon. I had to write in just to get a PayNow option added. Whether that was my feedback that triggered it or just coincidence, I will never know. Either answer is bad.
In 2026, calling yourself a tech company means almost nothing. Vibe coding exists. Any founder with a clear problem and a few hours can build functional software. The moat was never supposed to be the technology. It was supposed to be scale, network effects, and the stickiness of operations built around the product. They had all of that. And they let it erode feature by feature, policy by policy, account manager by account manager.
They are not competing with a courier. They are competing with a platform's retention budget.
Sea Limited built SPX Express because external providers were not meeting their standards for Shopee sellers. The difference is Sea Limited owns Shopee. SPX does not need to be profitable as a standalone courier. It exists to keep sellers on the platform, and pricing it below market is simply the cost of that retention.
Ninja Van cannot win this fight on price. You cannot out-price a competitor that is not trying to make money from the same service. Every seller who switches to SPX is one less reason for a Shopee seller to think about alternatives. The volume bleed is structural and it is not reversible.
How much runway is left?
Ninja Van is private so full financials are not public, but what is visible is not encouraging. Revenue fell 8% in FY2024. Then another 3% in FY2025. Two consecutive years of decline. Pre-tax losses narrowed 32% in FY2025, but only through aggressive cost-cutting, not business recovery. Two rounds of layoffs in 2024. Vietnam operations suspended after reports of unpaid salaries. Latest financing in late 2025 was $54.6 million in new preference shares from existing investors at a valuation almost certainly a fraction of their 2021 unicorn peak.
Here is the uncomfortable question behind every round of cost-cutting: how much manpower can you remove before there is not enough left to run daily operations?
Last-mile logistics is not a software business. It runs on people. Sorters, drivers, customer service, hub operations staff. You can automate some of it. You cannot automate all of it. Every wave of layoffs buys time. It does not solve the structural problem. At some point you hit the headcount floor and the losses have nowhere left to go.
The investors who backed the 2021 Series E at unicorn valuation are sitting on a write-down right now. It was good while it lasted. But the odds were always against them.
Every business in the world is a red ocean.
I do not say this to be grim. I say it because I think founders and investors deserve honesty about what building a business actually involves.
Ninja Van did everything right for a while. Real problem solved. Massive market. Serious funding. Regional scale. And they are still here fighting for survival because the market does not hold still, platforms build in-house, and one pricing decision from a better-capitalised competitor can undo years of loyalty.
Every category ends up like this. Every moat gets crossed. Every edge gets competed away. Business is genuinely, brutally difficult. Not in a motivational speech way. In a real, sustained, grinding way. For every Ninja Van that makes it to unicorn status, there are hundreds that did not. And even making it to unicorn is not the finish line.
So here is my honest take: if you want to build, build. But if you are thinking about where to put capital, listed companies are a different game. You get liquidity. You get public financials. You get the ability to exit when the story changes. The investor who backed Ninja Van at the 2021 Series E is sitting on a write-down right now. The investor who bought Sea Limited equity in 2024 is up over 300%.
Build businesses if you have a genuine edge and the appetite for the grind. Invest in listed ones if you want better odds and a cleaner exit.
Every business in the world is a freaking red ocean. It is just too damn difficult. So do not invest in private businesses. Invest in listed ones.
Common questions about Ninja Van and SPX Express.
Why is Ninja Van losing business to SPX Express?
SPX Express is Shopee's in-house logistics arm built by Sea Limited. It prices deliveries at around $2.60 per parcel versus Ninja Van's $3.90 plus GST plus surcharges, with no minimum volume and same-day pickup for orders created before 2pm. SPX does not need to be profitable as a standalone courier because it exists to retain sellers on the Shopee platform. Ninja Van cannot compete on price with a competitor that is not trying to make money from the courier service itself.
Is Ninja Van shutting down?
Ninja Van has not announced a shutdown as of mid-2026, but the signs are concerning. Revenue fell 8% in FY2024 and another 3% in FY2025. The company conducted two rounds of layoffs in 2024, suspended Vietnam operations, and its latest financing was new preference shares from existing investors rather than fresh growth capital. The business is cutting costs to narrow losses rather than investing in recovery.
How much has Ninja Van raised in total funding?
Ninja Van has raised over $1.1 billion across nine funding rounds, including a $578 million Series E in September 2021 that valued the company at over $1 billion. Backers have included Alibaba Group, B Capital, DPDgroup, Monk's Hill Ventures, and a Brunei sovereign wealth fund.
Who founded Ninja Van and why?
Ninja Van was founded in 2014 by Lai Chang Wen, Shaun Chong, and Boxian Tan. Lai Chang Wen left his derivatives trading role at Barclays to run Marcella, a men's custom menswear brand. Frustrated by slow and unreliable local couriers affecting his online orders, he built Ninja Van as a tech-first logistics solution to solve the problem he was living firsthand.
Is SPX Express cheaper than Ninja Van for Singapore sellers?
Yes. As of mid-2026, SPX Express charges around $2.60 per parcel for Singapore deliveries with no minimum volume requirement and same-day pickup for orders created before 2pm. Ninja Van charges $3.90 and above plus GST and an additional platform surcharge. For a seller dispatching regularly, SPX represents a saving of over 30% per parcel.
Kevin Chia is a Singapore-based entrepreneur and options trader. He co-built Vivre Activewear from $10k to over $2M in annual revenue, and founded Snapbook.ai. He writes about business, semi-retirement, and honest takes on what actually works at kevinchia.sg.