Noida-based bike taxi and delivery app N.O.W has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from the promoters of Hero Electric, the two-wheeler manufacturer and part of the Hero Group, a media statement said.
Vinay Goyal, angel investor and founder of truck aggregator Instavans, came on board as a new investor in this round. Existing investors who participated include Maple Capital Advisors; Abhinav Grover, director at Maple Accelerator; the family of the Jaipuria Group; and Anuj Sanghi, director of automobile spare parts firm Supreme Motors, the statement added.
N.O.W will use the funds to build a voice-based platform, hire for its tech and business verticals and expand to other geographies, Vivek Pandey, co-founder and chief executive of the venture, told VCCircle.
“Our focus was to first consolidate our business in Delhi NCR and achieve profitability and after doing that, we now want to replicate this model in other nearby cities besides getting deeper into our current clusters,†Pandey said in the statement.
Run by TapTap Meals Pvt. Ltd, the two-year-old company secured seed funding in January 2016 from Maple Accelerator, the startup accelerator programme of Maple Capital Advisors.
Last year, the startup ran a pilot project using e-bikes from Hero Electric, which the startup claims boosted its unit economics. As part of the current funding round, N.O.W will continue its association with Hero Electric, the press note added.
“We started a pilot with e-bikes late last year and realised the unit economics on electric vehicles are exemplary along with the support and maintenance from Hero Electric and its proved to be a great success,†Pandey explained.
N.O.W facilitates deliveries from restaurants, pharmacies, grocery stores, and many more. It also has a self-serve facility where riders and merchants can enrol themselves on their own on the platform. The startup currently operates in the Delhi NCR region and claims to have more than 500 rider partners and hundreds of merchants on its platform. In its initial days, N.O.W operated deliveries only for food companies but later pivoted to a hybrid model that offers not only deliveries but rides as well.
The firm’s client list includes KFC, Burger King, Fortis and Apollo, to name a few.
N.O.W was founded in 2015 by Pandey, Bharat Khandelwal, and Sahil Bhagat. Pandey, an alumnus of IIT Kanpur, had previously worked with companies such as Flipkart, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Khandelwal was earlier associated with Times Internet and Unicon Investment Solutions. Bhagat is a computer science graduate. Sushant Arora, a former Flipkart executive with experience in supply chain management, also founded the firm but is now no longer associated with the startup.
*The article has been updated with the status of the fourth co-founder Sushant Arora.