BlackBuck, an online platform for booking freights and inter-city logistics, has today announced that it has raised a whopping $70 million in its latest round of funding. The round was led by Sands Capital, along with the participation of existing investors Accel Partners, Tiger Global, Apoletto, and Flipkart.
Earlier, International Finance Corporation (IFC), the investment arm of World Bank had committed $10 million in the $30 million Series C round of funding for the startup. Prior to that, the company had raised $25 million in its Series B round and $5 million in its Series A round. So, the total investment for BlackBuck comes to around $130 million.
Commenting about the newly infused capital and its utilization, Rajesh Yabaji, CEO at BlackBuck, said,
We will be utilizing the current capital for tripling our tech and product investments. By this we will improve our engineering team and hire 100 members over the next year or two. We are also getting talent from the West for our data sciences team and are building better algorithms around pricing and auctions.
Co-founded by Rajesh Yabaji, Chanakya Hridaya and Ramasubramaniam in April 2015, the company uses a marketplace model to match the supply and demand for full-truck load (FTL) services between different cities. Its clientele includes companies such as Coke, Marico, Asian Paints, and Tata Steel among others.
BlackBuck is operating on an ‘asset-light’ model, meaning it doesn’t own the trucks and that plays into the second component of its platform, the execution side. BlackBuck offers tech to help track trucks during the transportation process, while also making things easier for drivers.
The company estimates that road-based options account for 63 percent of all freight in India, with a current spend of around $140 billion per year. India’s logistics segment has recently seen a massive surge in startups coming up to address issues with this massive yet highly unorganised sector.
In this market, BlackBuck competes against the likes of Rivigo, which has recently raised Rs 100 crore in debt funding in order to expand its fleet of trucks. Till now, Rivigo’s total fund-raising stands at around $115 million.
