Pickingo raises $1.3 million to expand its presence to 20 new cities

Pickingo, an on demand B2B hyperlocal logistics start-up, has announced to raise $1.3 million in funding led by Rehan Yar Khan of Orios Venture Partners along with participation from Toppr Co-Founder Zishaan Hayath, both early investors in Ola Cabs. The venture will use this fund to expand its presence to 20 new cities and in building technology, geographical expansion and customer acquisition. Started in December 2014, Gurgaon-based start-up raised its first round of funding in March 2015 from a couple of investors.

Commenting on the investment, Rehan Yar Khan, Founder & Partner, Orios Venture Partners, said, "Just like in other verticals such as food, grocery, laundry etc, hyperlocal logistics will be disrupted through on-demand, players using an uberised model. We have already seen this model become a huge success in China with billion dollar player emerging within a year of starting up, and also in the US. Players like Pickingo will enable reliable and efficient movement of goods from the merchant to the consumer and vice versa, and eventually even between consumers."

The 8 months old start-up - which is currently operational in six cities including Jaipur, Bengaluru, Mumbai, Pune and Hyderabad - was founded by a group of IIT Kanpur and IIM Bangalore alumni with an aim to disrupt the way goods move within a city from the merchant to the end consumer.

The company is doing reverse-pickups for large e-commerce players such as Jabong, Snapdeal, Shopclues and PayTM across 6 cities and has seen significant merchant adoption in hyperlocal logistics. More than 300 restaurants, groceries and pharmacies have signed up for their on demand delivery service including some large hyperlocal start-ups.

"It's a very exciting space right now. Huge supply and demand are present in different planes of cost, time and geography, we just need to match them using technology to unlock a large number of transactions," said Rahul Gill, Co-Founder and CEO, Pickingo.

In the past four months, Pickingo has scaled up to more than 100 on-roll employees. They currently service more than 3,000 deliveries per day with a fleet 300 field executives. Recently, Pickingo was selected among three companies to be featured in the Google-Deloitte Report on Impact of Cloud and Mobile Technologies on SMBs in India.

Having a team with strong engineering and academic background combined with years of professional experience in operations management, Pickingo attacks the logistics space with fresh ideas and with emphasis on use of technology.

Market Potential

As per market research firm Research and Markets, Indian logistics market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 12.17 per cent by 2020 driven by the growth in the manufacturing, retail, FMCG and e-commerce sector. The growth is backed by the boom in the e-commerce sector and expansionary policies of the FMCG firms. Though the service geography of logistics firms has increased significantly, they still have to meet the demands of quick delivery and tight service level agreements.

Other Investments

Apart from Pickingo, recently Bangalore-based techno-logistics start-up Letstransport.in also raised $1.3 million in funding from Singapore based Japaness vencture capital firm Rebright Venture Partners. Last month, Roadrunnr, a Bengaluru-based venture catering merchants, restaurants and e-commerce companies, also raised $11 million in funding from Sequoia Capital, Nexus Venture Partners and Blume Ventures. On-demand booking platform for mini-trucks Moovo.in also raised an undisclosed amount in seed funding from cricketer Yuvraj Singh's venture investment fund YouWeCan and another Bangalore-based start-up theKarrier raised Rs 1.5 crore ($240,000) in a seed round of funding led by Sol Primero.