Dunzo, a personal task management service startup based in Bengalore, has raised $650,000 in its seed funding round from Blume Ventures and Aspada with participation from angel investors like Rajan Anandan and Sandipan Chattopadhyay.
The company is planning to use the funds raised for product development and for hiring talent, especially in the areas of design, product development, engineering and artificial intelligence.
Founded by Kabeer Biswas, Ankur Aggarwal, Dalvir Suri and Mukund Jha last year, Dunzo has a unique take on the local commerce/chat-based concierge services with to-do lists approach and owning the entire stack in getting the tasks completed.
It allows customers to create to-do lists on the app following which a Dunzo human operator tries to understand the task via a chat popup and then execute it in a way that users wants to get it done.
Consumers also have the option to co-ordinate with the operators through a chat interface for any specific requests as well as add, change or cancel tasks.
The company currently has around 16-17 people with most of them being in the engineering department. It currently has tie-ups with around 100-150 businesses. It claims to be adding more businesses on a daily basis.
Currently, it focusses on four main categories- shipping packages from point to point, buying, repairing stuff and home services. With 24×7 service, dunzo claims that they have encountered diverse use cases so far including requests to repair clocks, buy laptops and other gifts, getting shattered phone screens replaced, etc.
Kabeer Biswas, co-founder of the company, said,
We went around getting partners for only things that users wanted. We realized that very very tiny percentage of local businesses actually matter in the local space and you don’t end up using more than top 5% of local businesses.
We are also increasingly getting into a point where we can go ahead and make a percentage of the business that we send to businesses because large transactions are now flowing towards businesses that we recommend. This is also because we complete the whole transaction including logistics and payments etc.
Dunzo currently charges the consumer in case there are any logistics involved during the task. The fee varies due to different margins of local businesses.
Presently, the company intends to focus on Bengaluru for some time and intends to expand to other cities of the nation over the next quarter.
It will be interesting to see what dunzo focusses on in the future and how they enhance their full stack approach for different complex problems and user requests.
