Blackbuck, an online platform for booking freights and working on inter-city logistics, has now raised a fresh $25 Million in Series B round, led by Tiger Global Management and Yuri Milner’s DST Global. Flipkart and Accel Partners — the two Series A investors — also participated in this round.
The startup — which, with the two rounds it has raised so far, has become the most well funded startup in this space globally, helps enterprises and large consumer goods companies to move their freights between cities. Blackbuck provides an online platform to help companies take care of all of their needs and monitor the logistics movement.
Rajesh Yabaji, co-founder of BlackBuck says,
We will quickly become the largest transport company of India, especially in the full truck load segment. Logistics space is being chased from consumer angle till now by startups, from hyper-local to intra-city, so consumers can order a truck on their app. That’s a small part of the market, while 95% is between businesses and across two cities.
India’s logistics segment has recently seen a surge in startups coming up to address this massive yet highly unorganised sector. And while startups continue to come up, investors too are optimistic and upbeat about this segment. And that shows worth the recent line of capita-raise undergone by sinter-city logistics startups.
The Porter, which was one of the first to offer services in this niche, secured a $5.5 Million (Rs 35 crore) second round by Sequoia Capital India, earlier in June this year. Similarly, a smaller company working in this space — Moovo — grabbed an angel round from Yuvraj Singh-floated YouWeCan Ventures. A more significant rival in this space would be TruckFirst, which secured a $10 Million round from SAIF Partners, along with the participation of Singapore Post and McKinsey’s Travel Director Thomas Netzer.
Other startups getting substantial traction and capital backing in this space include Nandan Nilekani invested Fortigo, Zishan Hayath and Snapdeal founders-backed Shadowfax and Japan’s Rebright partners-backed Lets Transport.
While startups have been coming up and gulping down investments, larger companies and some of India’s bigger startups too have jumped into the bandwagon. In terms of more established business houses, automotive behemoth Mahindra announced the launch of an online platform named SmartShift that connects cargo owners and transporters., virtually acting as an online marketplace for intracity logistics.
And while Snapdeal invested into GoJavas, Flipkart bought back a significant portion of their logistics arm from WS Retail. The latter has also announced plans to invest as much as $2-$3 Billion in improving its logistics infrastructure.
