Exclusive: On-demand logistics startup Pickrr raises undisclosed pre-Series A funding from Swastika, HNIs
On-demand, first-mile logistics startup Pickrr today raised an undisclosed pre-Series A funding from Hong Kong-based VC firm Swastika and other HNI investors. This is the second round of funding for the Delhi-based firm.
They had initially raised a seed round of funding from Karan Talwar of BNT Talbros Group, Prashan Agarwal, Co-founder of 19miles, and, earlier, had co-founded PropTiger; and from early and mid-stage VC firm Palaash Ventures.
With this round of funding the team is looking at strategic expansion into multiple cities. “We are already company-wise profitable and sustainable on our homeground Delhi. We are also planning to beef up our technology offering,” says Rhitiman Majumder, Co-founder, Pickrr.
The team claims to be doing close to doing 6,000 orders per day with zero marketing and discounting and a meagre team size of just 10-15 members. “Our growth rate has been phenomenal at a rate of 100 percent month-on-month,” adds Rhitiman.
Founded in August 2015, the idea of Pickrr had come to Ankit Kaushik and Gaurav Mangla, after they had sold their first venture, OptimizedBits, and Rhitiman had just finished his MBA. The trio got together being friends for a long time.
During discussion, they found that one of the major problems that struck the courier industry was inefficiencies, especially in the use of new-age technologies, thereby delivering third-grade service in a developing country. That’s when they got the idea of starting Pickrr. Speaking of their differentiator, Rhitiman says:
“The key difference is our technological approach which has enabled us efficiency in courier aggregation is establishing a first-of-a-kind first-mile logistics model, which in turn has given us a sustainable and scaleable reverse logistics model. This combination gives the customer the best possible shipping experience and made us profitable within six months of operations.”
Pickrr works as an asset-light, intelligent shipping solution with aggregated courier partners. So there are two points of view: for the business customers it works as an end-to-end logistics solution. From product point of view, Pickrr has AI and machine learning-based software.
“Our intelligent dashboard provides our business customers with all the reports and transparent analytics in a simple format to manage their business,” adds Rhitiman.
The logistics space is fast growing in India. Logistics Market India 2015-2020, a report by Novonous, suggests that the logistics market is close to $300 billion and is poised to grow at a CAGR of 12.7 percent by 2020.
In the intra-city logistics space, the other major players are TruckSumo, Blowhorn, which raised seed funding from Unitus, Shipr, and TheKarrier that raised Rs 1.5 crore from Sol Primero in May 2015, among others.
In the intercity logistics space is Blackbuck that raised $25 million in Series-B funding from marquee investors like Accel Partners, Flipkart, Tiger Global, Apolette, and Yuri Milner’s Founder’s Fund – DST Global.
Eyeing the $300-billion market are also giants like Mahindra & Mahindra, which launched SmartShift, and other players like Rivigo.
The team aims to revolutionalise both forward and reverse logistics more efficiently and fast connecting all the loose ends via technology. They will be launching two major SAAS-based products by the end of this year.
“Further, for our customers, we will be launching more analytics-based tools to increase the delivery efficiency of the products by decreasing returns and getting hassle-free money reconciliation, which is an unlikely factor in the existing courier players. This in turn will also help us in retaining more customers without any price war,” says Rhitiman.
