Intra-city logistics aggregator Cogos Technologies Pvt. Ltd has raised $1 million (around Rs 7 crore) from the Indian Angel Network (IAN), Emergent Ventures and high-net-worth individuals.
IAN investor Niraj Saran led the startup’s pre-Series A funding round and will join its board, the angel network said in a statement.
Saran is a founder at a startup building a monetization platform for virtual reality content in the San Francisco Bay Area. He earlier worked with ed-tech startup TenMarks Education, which was acquired by Amazon.
Cogos will use the funds to optimise its technological offerings, develop transportation solutions and strengthen its workforce, it added.
The startup was founded by in June 2016 by Prasad Sreeram, who is its CEO and Rama Mohan Katta, the COO. It offers its tech-enabled platform to help trucking businesses plan, schedule, assign and monitor shipments. It has presence in 45 cities across 11 states.
“Shippers involved in the trucking business often face difficulties. This is due to the absence of a solid infrastructure which can facilitate robust collaborations across various touch-points in the transportation process," said Sreeram. “Any enterprise with bulk logistic requirements across various sectors such as e-commerce, retail, manufacturers, etc. can make use of our tech-enabled services.”
Logistics-tech funding deals
India has recorded a string of major funding deals in the logistics-technology segment this year.
Last month, BlackBuck raised $150 million in its Series D round while Falcon Edge Capital and Tiger Global Management LLC led a $22 million investment in Locus.
In March, Delhivery entered the unicorn club after raising $395 million in a Series F funding round led by Japanese conglomerate SoftBank.
Private equity firm Carlyle and China's Fosun also invested in this round. Last month, VCCircle reported that Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, the North American country’s biggest public pension fund, is looking to acquire a significant minority stake in Delhivery.
Rivigo is also on the verge of entering the unicorn club. It last raised around Rs 255 crore ($36 million) from existing investors Warburg Pincus and SAIF Partners earlier this year.
Investors
The IAN is one of the most active angel networks in India. It has invested in more than 110 startups including Druva Software, Sapience Analytics, SP Robotics, FarEye and Unboxd Ltd.
IAN's investments this year include cataloguing startup Flatpebble, local discovery and e-commerce platform Little Black Book and data analytics firm Clootrack.
The network has also launched its own Rs 450 crore IAN Fund, which has raised the targeted corpus and is looking to make the final close soon.
Emergent Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm that invests in IT companies, particularly enterprise technology companies focused on IT infrastructure, data management, security and business applications, its website shows. The firm backs startups in Silicon Valley and India and invests from the seed stage till the Series A round.
The venture firm has invested in software company Kuliza, California-headquartered Observe.ai, which also a technology team in Bengaluru; and Minjar Cloud Solutions Pvt. Ltd, which operates a cloud computing platform. Minjar was acquired by Nutanix last year.
