Intercity logistics marketplace Trukky is raising $500,000 (Rs 3.25 crore) in a pre-Series A funding round from existing as well as new angel investors, a top company executive told VCCircle.
Owned and operated by Trukky Logistics Pvt Ltd, the SME-focused, mobile-first intercity logistics services platform offers on-demand transportation solutions to both the full load and part load segments.
Confirming the development, Subhasish Das, co-founder and CEO of Trukky, said the company will use the fresh capital on consumer acquisition, besides expanding its services to more Indian cities.
It offers part-load or load-sharing services of 50-3,000 kg across 50 routes, and full load (truck rental) services up to 21 tonnes across 30 major routes in the country.
The company’s load-sharing service enables consumers to transport shipments in small quantities and pay only for the space occupied in a consignment.
The company has over 5,000 vehicles on the platform and offers services to various industries, including paper and pulp, FMCG, cement, agricultural products, ecommerce, fast-moving consumer durables and chemical sectors.
The company was founded in 2015 by Das along with Saswat Sahu and Rishi Raj.
In 2015, Trukky had raised an undisclosed amount of funding from MakeMyTrip cofounder Keyur Joshi and Bakeri Group scion Pavan Bakeri.
Trukky claims to have achieved Rs 7 crore of gross sales in the past 10 months.
TRaUI Index
Trukky has introduced a price index, which is a first-of-its-kind innovation in the transportation industry. The Trukky Rate Utility Index helps consumers and industry experts to track and study daily changes in freight rates.
The proprietary pricing engine captures market dynamism and measures over 10 variables simultaneously to drive competitive prices on the platform. The index would trend hourly rate changes helping tech-enabled transportation firms to optimise the freight space.
“TRaUI has been compiled with data collated over 40 months covering more than 10,000 trips and has been fine tuned to accommodate variance due to seasonality, freight type, type of vehicle and supply-demand dynamics,†said Das.
It works real-time by analysing supply, demand and reference price feed from truckers on a daily basis.
According to a Business Insider article of December 16, Amazon is building an app that will connect truck drivers with shippers. The app, scheduled to launch in the summer of 2017, will offer real-time pricing and driving directions.
Trukky competes with a set of new-age, tech-enabled logistic services that have mushroomed in India over the past three years, including heavily VC-backed players such as BlackBuck and Rivigo. These internet-based startups aim to reduce transit time of trucks and maximise utility of the assets for truck operators.
BlackBuck had recently raised $70 million (Rs 476 crore) in a Series C funding from Sands Capital and others, while Rivigo had secured $75 million from private equity firm Warburg Pincus in a Series C round in November.
While BlackBuck focuses largely on the full-truck-load (FTL) segment in the B2B space, Rivigo provides FTL and part truck-load and cold chain services to B2B clients.
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