Intracellular delivery of therapeutic macromolecules, ranging from peptides and protein to nucleic acids, and drugs to a target cell is a fast growing and promising arm in modern drug development. This can be a complex task, dependent on whether organelle targeting is required to achieve the desired effect, with off target side effects of the delivered cargo often proving challenging. The ability to target cargo to a specific cell affords opportunities to enhance or restrict cellular replication, enabling treatment of multiple life-threatening diseases including cancer, viral infections, autoimmune diseases, neurodegenerative diseases and metabolic disorders. Current efforts to target cargo to specific cells have relied on chemical modification of payload, viral vectors and non-viral carriers. However, little effort has been given to the use of virus-like particles (VLPs) for the targeted delivery and trafficking of functional cargo, even though they possess several features that make them attractive as potential nanocarriers. Here we describe the smallest known VLPs, which self-assemble from a circovirus, beak and feather disease virus (BFDV) capsid-protein, a virus known to not infect mammals. We have solved the VLPs structure by a combination of x-ray crystallography and Cryo-EM; The 17 nm assemblies comprised 60 Cap monomers in the absence and presence of single-stranded DNA (ssDNA), and where determined to 2.5 Å and 2.3 Å resolution respectively, in the same space group, arranged as 12 pentamers. Furthermore using in vitro studies, we show that BFDV VLPs can bind and deliver fluorescently-labelled non-specific nucleic acids to HeLa and cancerous astrocyte cell lines. This VLP-based delivery system may facilitate novel avenues for the targeted delivery of therapeutic drugs including siRNA for human diseases.