Streamlining E-Commerce Logistics The Delhi-headquartered company claims to be month-on-month profitable with the current ARR (annual recurring revenue) of INR 120 crore

Rhitiman Majumder met the future co-founders, Gaurav Mangla and Ankit Kaushik, for his startup during his stint at consulting firm iRunway. Even after moving on from the company to pursue different things in their careers, the trio stayed in touch and regularly discussed the prospect of building a venture together.

"We would regularly bounce business ideas as we had the complementary skill sets to start up," recalls Majumder.

In 2015, the former colleagues-cum-friends came together to start Pickrr, a software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based logistics solutions company. The idea behind Pickrr was to streamline the highly disorganized logistics sector. "We'd set out to decrease the hassle in logistics through a simplified product that sellers could use to outsource all their logistics requirements to," says the co-founder and CEO Majumder.

At first, Majumder built the minimum viable product (MVP)—the most basic version of a product—for Pickrr after understanding the major pain points in the e-commerce industry from some of his friends working in the space. Pickrr started as an asset-heavy model with biker delivery partners, which the founders soon realized was not a sustainable model to continue with.

"We almost ran out of operating cash flow at one point. Running a business in a cash crunch and still keeping your clients was pretty hard," Majumder recalls.

Five years later, the company is an end-to-end logistics solution platform for e-commerce sellers that provides a range of solutions for operational inefficiencies, pricing confusions, and logistics partner selection, among other things.

Pickrr provides a virtual courier service for logistics requirements of e-commerce sellers, re-sellers, SMEs, and private brands for a better shipping experience. Businesses can integrate Pickrr on their platforms and sync all their orders onto a single dashboard that helps them simplify shipping by dispatching, managing, and tracking orders all at one place.

On being asked what makes Pickrr stand out from other logistics solutions companies, Majumder is quick to respond that it's the company's strong technology DNA and razor-sharp focus on scalability and profit that makes it stand apart.

"We believe we have figured the right service-technology combination required to solve logistics woes in the market," says Majumder.

The company has tied up with over 20 carriers, including Blue Dart, Shadowfax, FedEx, and India Post, among others, and helps sellers process high-volume deliveries fast with its AI-powered engine Calcula that automatically selects an ideal carrier suited to the seller's needs.

Pickrr has served around 27,000 sellers so far, including the likes of Bosch, Skullcandy, Emami, Oziva, and Suta, and processes about 16 lakh monthly shipments.

Turned profitable during the pandemic

While 2020 marked the toughest times for most businesses across sectors due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Majumder takes pride in the fact that Pickrr achieved profitability in the same year.

The Delhi-headquartered company claims to be month-on-month profitable with the current ARR (annual recurring revenue) of INR 120 crore. Entrepreneur India could not independently check these figures.

Not to say that the company and its founders did not face any challenges and setbacks at all at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. "We also saw days with zero orders and no revenue, confusions in shipping restrictions, uncertain demand, and supply," says Majumder. "But, overall, 2020 has been a solid learning experience for us."

In fact, he points out that to be able to successfully deliver millions of shipments during and post lockdown when people could not go out to shop physically is one of the high points of his entrepreneurial career."It was one of the most fulfilling experiences to help our seller partners back on their feet and at the same time deliver much-needed joy to customers across the country."

In the past year, Pickrr also raised its first external investment of $4 million in a Series A funding round led by Omidyar Capital India and Guild Capital.

Majumder says the company aims to use the fresh capital to become a brand that online sellers use for anything and everything related to logistics: warehousing and fulfillment, cross-border logistics, B2B logistics, and more.

"We are also planning to provide our tech solutions to aggregators and franchisees so that we can manage their shipments through a single end to end platform," he says.

Rhitiman Majumder made it to the list of Entrepreneur India's 35Under35 list of 2021.