As e-commerce takes a more matured form in India, supporting businesses required for ecommerce platform’s surging growth, are coming up rapidly now. In that context, Locus, a Bangalore-based start-up which manages logistics and provides delivery automation service for on-demand businesses, has raised an undisclosed angel round from numerous investors.
The round was led by GrowX Ventures and Manish Singhal along with the participation of Sanjay Mehta, Ankit Pruthi and Bhupen Shah.
With fresh capital coming in, the company is now looking to expand its team by hiring new talent across different sectors. Founded by Nishith Rastogi and Geet Garg, Locus provides solutions for on-demand business to dispatch, track and manage on-field workforce.
It includes route deviation engine, order dispatch automation, field user app, route optimization, tracking for end-customer and predictive analytics. The services are offered to customers as PaaS (platform as a service) via their APIs.
In fact, Locus’s API solutions are what attracted me more. While other online logistics service providers are building online platforms for facilitating deliveries, Locus has built a cluster of APIs, so as to led developers of e-commerce/delivery apps embed the same into their apps, and track delivery using Locus’ platform. This entire concept is perhaps the most appealing part in Locus’s model.
The company claims that it has paying enterprise customers which include food delivery services, laundry pickup services and similar Point A pickup to Point B drop services.
Earlier, it launched a safety app called Ridesafe, powered by Realtime Route Deviation Detection (R2D2) engine developed by Locus itself. It monitors passenger’s travel route and alerts if a driver deviates from the intended route, in real time.
It also takes alternate routes, traffic detours and several such factors into account. The app can also be used to exchange locations while meeting people, and keeping a tab of one’s own trips.
Manish Singhal, one of the investor in this round, said,
“It all started with a women safety app and now they are moving strongly into providing an effective and user friendly tech solution to B2B logistics solutions & delivery companies.”
