The funds raised will be utilized in expanding the team, improving the technology, developing new efficient products, Marketing and brand building.

ShipEase helps D2C brands and SME e-tailers to make their supply chain efficient. The company offers the best-in-class automated shipping services and seamlessly ships to 28000+ pincodes with smart courier allocation.  

Founded by a trio of accomplished professionals, ShipEase team has a collective experience in logistics, e-commerce, and technology. Pawan Kumar, the CEO, brings expertise from Xpressbees, Ecom Express, and Delhivery Ltd. Lalit Singh, the CRO, brings expertise from FedEx, Delhivery, and Reliance Industries. Ajay K, MD & CTO comes with tech experience working with RBS, Iris Inc, and Aricent.

Vikram Ramasubramanian, Partner, Inflection Point Ventures, says, “Logistics play a pivotal role specially for D2C brands as managing supply chain is one of the biggest cost heads. For new and emerging brands, to build their own supply chain pan India, is a multi-crore commitment. However, ShipEase’s platform and their tech approach can help brands reach their customers faster while keeping logistics costs low.”

ShipEase’s technology-enabled logistics solution provides end-to-end automation for varied delivery requirements including tracking the products, NDR Management and so on. The cost-effective methods and robust technology position the company as one of the most preferred partners for brands and SMEs.

Pawan Kumar, Founder, ShipEase, says, “We would like to project ourselves as tech savvy organization for D2C community and offline brands right from managing the production, inventory control, supply chain followed by logistics. It has been a phenomenal experience so far with IPV for putting faith in us and believing in our team & vision.”

Few remarkable achievements include:

• ShipEase serves a wide seller base of 2000+ clients with the business quantum of 3.5 Lakhs+ shipments per month.
• The company operates on a double-digit positive EBITDA as per Jul’23 trends.

The company has accomplished this exceptional growth with a very lean team size and in a very short span of time.

The Supply Chain Management Market was valued at approximately US$ 26.8 billion in 2022. It is anticipated to achieve a valuation of around US$ 62.20 billion by 2030, exhibiting a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 11.1% from 2023 to 2030.

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One of the leading logistics SaaS platform FarEye announced a Series D investment of $ 25 million led by M12 (Microsoft’s venture fund) with participation from Eight Roads Ventures and Honeywell Ventures. The company’s existing investor SAIF Partners also participated in the round.

FarEye was founded in 2013 by Kushal Nahata, Gaurav Srivastava, and Gautam Kumar and the predictive logistics platform enables enterprises to orchestrate, track, and optimize their logistics operations. FarEye offers exceptional delivery experience and efficient movement of goods for both B2C and B2B segments and empowers enterprises to win in this customer-centric era.

“We deeply value the support and trust of our investors, customers, and partners who have been instrumental to our success. I am delighted to see the impact we are making by optimizing multi-million deliveries on a daily basis. We will use this investment to create greater value and improve the
experience for our customers by enhancing the platform’s predictive capabilities, increasing platform partnerships, expanding into new markets, and growing our teams in Europe, APAC & US.” said Kushal Nahata, CEO, FarEye.

“From just-in-time logistics optimization to last-mile transportation notifications for end customers, supply chain visibility is a business imperative for organizations,” said Abhi Kumar, M12 India Head.
“FarEye stands out amongst other supply chain solutions for its orchestration and predictive intelligence capabilities, which equip enterprise customers to respond quickly and strategically in dynamic business environments.”

The company is offering its product ‘Serve’ at a zero-fee to enable the seamless movement of groceries and essential goods to help ensure businesses can reach their end customers as the world grapples with the COVID-19 pandemic.

Shweta Bhatia, Partner Eight Roads Ventures said, “The global pandemic has accelerated the need for enterprises to scale their supply chain operations efficiently to meet the rising share of online deliveries.
FarEye’s highly configurable last-mile and long-haul logistics platform have been validated by leading global enterprises across the 3PL, retail, and manufacturing categories. We are impressed by Kushal and his team’s deep customer-first approach and are proud to support their category-leading and comprehensive vision to continuously drive efficiencies and transform the end-user experience.”

“With supply chain and logistics networks becoming so critical in today’s environment, FarEye has proven to be a business-critical provider and enabler of delivery logistics. We strongly believe in the team and the FarEye’s platform and are excited to help accelerate their growth with our investment,” said Kamal Vasagiri, director of venture capital investments at Honeywell Ventures.

Today Fareye is present across 20 countries and has strong traction with more than 150 global Retailers, CPG companies, and Logistics & Transportation providers including DHL, Amway, Dominos, Walmart, Johnson & Johnson, and Hilti.

FarEye successfully handles more than 10 million transactions every day across the globe on its platform and provides better decisions based on billion-plus data-points fed into its machine learning engine. The platform’s ability to seamlessly digitize 3PL carriers’ operations and quickly integrate with external systems for predictive visibility has gained immense traction globally, positioning it as a marquee top-tier provider.

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Bangalore-based fashion e-commerce company Myntra today announced that it has acqui-hired InLogg, a technology platform that provides logistics solutions for the ecommerce sector. As part of the acquisition, the team at InLogg has been inducted into Myntra, making it an acqui-hire that will further strengthen and expand Myntra’s supply chain capabilities.

InLogg was founded in 2015 by a team with first hand expertise in fulfillment, technology and business, with an aim to standardize the process of logistics in remote areas and bring in efficiency. To enable reach, the InLogg platform has onboarded local and regional courier players in multiple states across the country. The company stitches composite supply chain using multiple regional logistics players to provide a pan India delivery network.

Over 50% of the e-commerce and retail business in India is contributed by tier 2, 3 and 4 cities and towns. With limited logistical capability and reliability in these areas, InLogg devised a solution to bridge the gap with technology. InLogg is uplifting technology sophistication of regional courier companies by providing SaaS for shipment lifecycle management, mobile apps for pickup, delivery, returns, Cash on Delivery reconciliation, reporting and analytics. This helps in standardizing the logistics fulfillment process and providing needed visibility. With this acquisition, Myntra will be able to strengthen its logistics capability with an expanded reach and improved customer experience.

Ananya Tripathi, Chief Strategy and Planning Officer, Myntra, said “The Inlogg acqui-hire with the platform and capabilities will help us scale while delivering great customer experience in Tier 2, 3 and 4 cities. It will allow us to leverage local and regional players to enhance our reach, reduce delivery time and develop a plug and play model which can be scaled in the future.”

Ambarish Kenghe, Chief Product Officer, Myntra, said “With the implementation of GST, launch of Value added services and continued focus on efficiency in FY18, has led to SCM becoming one of the most exciting areas where we will continue to invest for the future”

InLogg is Myntra’s fourth technology led acquisition. Myntra has previously acqui-hired Cubeit, Native5, and Fitiquette.

Picture credit: Pixabay

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BlackBuck, an online marketplace for inter-city logistics, has announced it has secured US$70 million in Series C funding from Sands Capital and existing investors.

The latest round of funding will be invested in building technology-led products for the freight industry to bring out efficiencies for, both, customers and truckers. The Bangalore-based company will also use a portion of the funds to scale up operations.

BlackBuck was founded in April 2015 by Rajesh Yabaji, Chanakya Hridaya and Ramasubraman, who together have 25 years of logistics experience.

BlackBuck is an online marketplace for inter-city trucking. It caters to long-distance in-land truck requirements of companies, providing them with a low-cost channel of freight procurement.

The company currently has over 1,00,000 trucks on its platform, present across 300 locations in the country. Its customers include Asian Paints, Unilever, Coke, Britannia, Godrej, Marico, Jyothy Laboratories and EID Parry.

In early 2015, BlackBuck had raised Series A funding of US$5 million from Accel Partners and Flipkart. Later, in December 2015, it secured US$25 million Series B round from Tiger Global and Apoletto (DST-Yuri Milner Founder Fund) with co-investment from Accel and Flipkart.

Speaking on the latest funding, Rajesh Yabaji, Co-founder and CEO, said, “At BlackBuck we are building products which will run logistics for the country in the near future. It is magical to see the infusion of technology in such an unorganised and fragmented field like logistics. Over the past couple of years, our understanding of freight dynamics has helped us create defensible frontiers in this industry. The journey going ahead is to fuel this revolution and enable the entire transportation ecosystem to converge towards it. This round of fund raise will help us invest much more aggressively in products & technology.”

According to Novonous market research, road freight is the largest transportation segment in India, constituting around 63% of the total freight movement and, is currently valued at $140 billion. Inter-city logistics accounts for a massive 95% of road freight movement; BlackBuck aims to revolutionize this large segment, removing bottlenecks and inefficiencies, using technology.

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Image Credit: Pixabay

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2016 has been an exciting year for the Indian logistics industry — from GST to startups, each development is enhancing the industry to be more efficient and effective. There is a major shift coming from startups with new technologies and business models — close to 90 startups have been funded since 2014.

2017 will filter out the ones with sustainable business models. The outlook for logistics in 2017 remains bright. In terms of startups, the one with the sound fundamental play will remain standing while the fund-raise play falls apart.

India’s logistics industry is fragmented and underdeveloped; this leads to logistics costs remaining relatively high, due to poor physical and communications infrastructure. High dwell time at ports, low levels of containerisation, and a multi-layered tax system contributing to significant delays at border crossing points.

The proposed goods and services tax (GST) will help companies reduce logistics cost by 1.5 to 2.5 per cent as they reconfigure their supply chains and bring in key structural changes like fewer and larger warehouses, and larger number of bigger trucks on the road.

With greater adoption of the hub-and-spoke model, these changes will lead to greater economies of scale for transport operators and lead to more companies outsourcing their logistics operations. Warehousing will be at centrestage with GST coming into effect as companies like Amazon looks to take a step forward in major cities like Hyderabad, while Alibaba looks to enter India through Paytm.

Demonetisation is also a boon to the industry as it is highly reliant on e-retail and online ordering. Cashless transactions and a digital India push will drive growth in hyperlocal logistics, which means there is a serious need for innovation and disruption in the last mile logistics space, which will be solved in coming years by startups like Last Mile Delivery, VDeliver, Lotruck and Connect India.

However, the payment gateway charges may cut into the thin margins of the providers and users. This requires a serious revamping and the cost must come down significantly to a level of one tenth of current levels.

The bold movement of Uberisation in India, led by companies like ReturnTrucks, is changing the vehicle engagement, utility, and transportation aspects of logistics. Newer trends will greatly change the landscape and dynamics of express cargo, which will take a different shape as newer companies like Rivigo, Delhivery, and Blackbuck take the ground and offer better value.

The value of time, which was never really understood by traditional players, will be a major reason for their lagging behind, as new players focus on route optimisation and quicker deliveries.

Global technological development will deeply impact and improve the logistics industry. Some of the major technologies in focus would be 3D printing, autonomous vehicles, AI, IoT, drones, and robotics. 3D printing will minimise the need for movement of spare parts and will greatly impact the logistics sector in coming years.

With AI and IoT already being used in tandem, their full potential will be unleashed in 2017, as more and more startups focus on AI for route optimisation, and IoT for fleet management and better optimisation for the operator. However, only a few logistics applications with substantial business impact have materialised so far.

Autonomous vehicles are on testing grounds. Self-driving vehicles have already made inroads into logistics, reaching a level of maturity for commercial use in warehouse operations. The next step for self-driving vehicles in logistics will be to overcome regulatory and security challenges to deploy autonomous vehicles on public roads.

While drones and UAVs still require mainstream adoption, first tests have demonstrated the future potential of UAVs especially in rural delivery scenarios. However drones will also be in focus in 2017, increased use and optimistic plans from the e-retail giant Amazon will completely change the landscape.

Advancements in robotics, AI and Machine Learning will greatly improve efficiency in logistics and warehousing, through various applications like warehouse robots and automation, route optimisation, territorial mapping and dynamic pricing.

2017 will be the defining year for the logistics industry, with better-than-expected growth, efficiency improvements, and newer technological applications. There will be mushrooming of startups, and the ones with clear sustainable business models will remain standing. We can expect more consolidation in the industry and also greater competition.

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This article was originally published on LinkedIn Pulse and was republished with permission.

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