Alexis Patjane and the business hidden inside the delivery

Alexis Patjane opened an online store and eventually got rid of the online store. The delivery promise survived. That is the useful twist in the history of 99minutos: its founder kept the part of the business that customers valued enough to ask for separately. The merchandise could belong to somebody else. The waiting, he thought, was a problem worth owning.

The idea began during a night out in Mexico City with two friends. A bar had run out of a supply they wanted. They wondered why they could not order it online and receive it immediately. An ordinary evening had produced a fairly immodest question. Plenty of people complain about waiting; fewer respond by giving themselves a deadline and putting it in the company name.

In 2014, Patjane began 99minutos as an e-commerce business offering delivery within its namesake interval. Customers could buy through the store and receive their purchases quickly. Soon the question became whether the shop itself deserved to remain in the picture. For a founder, that is an awkward discovery: the machinery you built around your product may be the thing people want to buy.

A restaurant that could travel

Patjane came to this experiment with experience making things that moved. Before 99minutos, he had a food-truck business using three-wheeled vehicles imported from India and China. He described vehicles that opened into small restaurants at the press of a button. There is a pleasing continuity here. First the restaurant travelled; later, the customer’s purchase did.

He had studied industrial engineering at Universidad Iberoamericana, graduating in 2012. It is a background that fits the subject without explaining away the person. Logistics asks how a sequence of physical actions can be arranged, repeated and improved. Entrepreneurship adds the less orderly question of whether anybody will pay for that arrangement.

The two questions meet in the decision to abandon the shop. Patjane was giving up a familiar retail proposition in favour of a service for retailers. A merchant could retain the products, prices and customer relationship, while 99minutos handled delivery. The founder’s original customer became a different kind of customer: someone with a shop of their own.

A delivery company has a peculiar intimacy with other people’s businesses. It turns up at the point where the merchant’s promise becomes tangible. The buyer may have spent minutes choosing a product and seconds paying for it. The wait afterward belongs to a different clock. Patjane built his company around that interval, where the satisfaction of purchasing can turn into the impatience of receiving.

The years a clock cannot shorten

A neat origin story can make the next few years sound inevitable. Patjane’s account of running 99minutos provides a useful interruption. In a 2022 conversation, he described administrative problems between 2016 and 2018, prolonged friction with a partner and periods when he went without a salary. His own savings were committed to the company.

Those details change the scale of the story. A business can be plausible to its customers and still be difficult for the people running it. Every parcel delivered gives the organization something to repeat. Every obligation to staff and suppliers creates another deadline. The company can appear to be moving while its founder is occupied with keeping it upright.

Patjane discussed the importance of seeking advice, filtering it and learning from mistakes. He also spoke about delegation. These are unglamorous subjects for a rapid-delivery founder, which is precisely why they belong here. There is a limit to how many decisions can pass through one person before that person becomes another queue.

The difficulty is especially clear in a service business. A founder cannot take the whole operation home and fix it overnight. Drivers, merchants and colleagues need decisions they can act on. Delegating creates room for that work to happen, while demanding that the founder accept an organization larger than his own reach.

Five years in, back to the classroom

In 2020, 99minutos joined Y Combinator’s winter batch. Patjane has explained why a company already five years into operating would enter an accelerator: he wanted access to investors capable of writing larger cheques. He described raising $5 million in three days through video calls and investment agreements as a surreal experience.

The striking detail is the company’s age. An accelerator sounds like something you attend at the beginning. Patjane treated it as a means of crossing a financial boundary later in the journey. Operational experience and access to capital were separate assets. Having accumulated one did not automatically supply the other.

Growth also brought demands that could be counted in people. During 2020, 99minutos increased its operations eightfold. Patjane said there were weeks when the company hired as many as 250 drivers. The speed of hiring put pressure on cash flow. An increase in orders could therefore arrive as both an opportunity and an immediate claim on the bank account.

It is a detail worth holding beside the name on the delivery van. Ninety-nine minutes is the time a customer sees. Recruitment, training and financing run on their own schedules. The customer’s short wait depends on a much longer sequence of decisions made before the order exists. A rapid service requires an organization prepared to move.

Capital comes with a to-do list

In March 2022, 99minutos announced an $82 million Series C led by Oak HC/FT, with participation from Kaszek and Prosus Ventures. The stated uses included expansion, new business models and sustainability initiatives. Patjane said: “We are eager to continue investing in our technology and infrastructure”. The sentence gives the money a job.

By May that year, the company’s plans extended into fulfillment warehouses, pickup locations and software for routing and tracking. Its finance leadership described a model combining an internal driver fleet with additional capacity during busy periods. This was a company making choices about the surrounding infrastructure, as well as the final journey to the door.

That wider remit helps explain the attraction and the burden of logistics. A merchant’s needs do not stop at dispatch. Stock has to be held somewhere. Packages have to be collected. A delivery network has to accommodate the occasions when demand outruns the usual schedule. Each added service offers another reason for a customer to stay and another responsibility for the operator to meet.

The environmental part of the plan has a similarly physical character. Electric delivery depends on vehicles, charging and the suitability of the route. Software can organize a journey, but it cannot charge a battery by persuasion. For Patjane, investment in the company’s infrastructure sits alongside investment in the systems that direct it.

“We are eager to continue investing in our technology and infrastructure”ALEXIS PATJANE · MARCH 2022

The novelist with another dispatch tomorrow

There is another occupation in Patjane’s biography: author. He wrote the science-fiction novel The Bright Light. His public professional profile lists it with an April 2013 date. In conversation, he has described persisting with a book even though writing was not something he particularly enjoyed.

A novel is an unexpected companion to a logistics company, though both require the patience to complete a sequence. The resemblance has limits. A manuscript can be finished. A delivery business opens itself to another day’s orders. The founder can revise the organization, but the next parcel will still need an address and someone to take it there.

In November 2024, Endeavor Mexico named Patjane Entrepreneur of the Year. The recognition supplies a milestone in a career whose daily work is more repetitive than the ceremony suggests. A trophy can stand still. The service that earned it has to keep going.

Before the last mile

By June 2025, Patjane was describing a company covering first, middle and last mile, warehousing, fulfillment, freight and cross-border trade. The scope had widened toward the earlier stages of a merchant’s supply chain. Containers moving from ports or borders toward distribution centres became part of the same customer problem as a parcel’s final delivery.

Freight99 received a formal public presentation in August 2025. The initial focus was Mexican domestic freight and port movements, with expansion to the company’s other regional markets described as a later stage. Its leaders discussed shipment visibility, documentation, communication with operators and security. Those details give the new service its practical shape.

The expansion also places more people around the founder’s original idea. Santiago Saviñón, the company’s growth chief, and Manuel Brenner, Freight99’s director, explained the freight offering; technology chief Jonathan Andrade described its systems. A business that began with friends asking about immediate delivery now required distinct people to explain distinct parts of the journey.

A July 2026 Argentine incorporation notice adds another dated development: Patjane was listed as a founding shareholder of 99 Minutos Argentina S.A. Incorporation records a legal step. It does not, by itself, establish that a delivery service has opened. Even expansion has stages, with paperwork sometimes arriving before the packages.

The thread through these changes remains the decision he made near the beginning. Patjane let the products go and kept the delivery. Since then, the job surrounding that delivery has grown to include what happens well before a driver approaches the door. The company still carries a small number on its vehicles. Behind it is a longer journey, and a founder repeatedly deciding how much of that journey to take on.