Pickingo, the hyperlocal logistics service provider, has eventually decided to shut down its operations as the company failed to garner enough fundings from inventor’s, reports LiveMint.
Firstly, the lack of money has made it extremely difficult for the company to survive in the market. Also, it has been facing headwinds from nearly 20 similar startups, which stepped in to challenge Pickingo in last 10 months.
The company was founded in December 2014 by Rahul Gill, Piyush Sharma, Rishav Papneja and Siddharth Maheshwari, with an aim to provide local merchants with a reliable and affordable on-demand alternative, that would aid them to hire their own delivery staff.
Earlier, the company had raised $1.3 million in seed funding from Rehan Yar Khan of Orios Venture Partners with participation from Zishaan Hayath. It was started out with reverse-pickups for e-commerce players such as Jabong, Snapdeal, Shopclues, and PayTM across six cities.
Recently, Zomato committed to invest in Pickingo and Grab. While Grab received the funding, the deal with Pickingo didn’t materialize. Also, the company’s efforts of raising capital from SAIF Partners turned to dust in no time.
As per the source, Shadowfax is close to take over the reverse logistics part of the business while the business-to-business (B2B) delivery start-up Grab will take over the hyperlocal delivery business in Bengaluru and Mumbai. Also, both companies will hire the team members of Pickingo.
It is also said that the co-founders will be appointed into different ventures which are promoted by Orios Venture Partners. Rahul Gill will join Ziffi’s senior management team. There is no information about where the other co-founders are headed. All the formalities are expected to be completed within a week.
There are just a few startups in the hyperlocal B2B logistics space which have managed to raised significant amount of funding. From 20 new startups in this space over the last 10 months, only Roadrunnr and Shadowfax have raised significant capital.
It seems that the honeymoon period is over for the hyperlocal delivery startups and food startups in India. SpoonJoy, a Bengaluru-based food ordering app, shut operations in Delhi, while Dazo said that it would wind up its operations soon.
