An Overview Of The Next “Fedex”

Why did they decide to set up LogiNext?

LogiNext was launched on 21st Feb 2014 by Mr. Dhruvil Sanghvi, now its chief executive officer, and Ms. Manisha Raisinghani, its chief technical officer.

Being alumni of Carnegie Mellon University and working in MNCs like Deloitte and IBM it gave the two the perfect window to look into how logistics and shipping will take off especially in emerging markets.

Despite the market potential the founders say that the logistics industry was so complex and unorganized and that no one had come up with a solution to it. So they decided to do it themselves.

Their research on the factors leading to the complex logistics structure pointed to lack of visibility in the delivery networks as one of the key reasons why the logistics services are so unreliable. Also, that was the time the market witnessed a huge surge in ecommerce, hyperlocal commerce and Uber kind of services where a lot of startups and large companies were jumping in but most of them were making losses because of very high logistics cost, uncertainties and frequent delays.

Since both were experts in the technology domain, they saw the solution in the Internet of Things and big data to optimize delivery networks, internal operations, and other logistics services. Moving forward with the expertise of logistics and technology they built their first product – LogiNext MileTM.

Here’s what else is happening with the company according to its founders.

Share with us what’s special about this venture and how it’s different from its competitors

LogiNext brings "real-time" factor to the way of doing logistics. Traditionally, all the planning and optimization is done using static and stale information. LogiNext is disrupting the reactive aspect of logistics to a more proactive, predictive and preventive way.

We don’t only draw beautiful pie charts and graphs and call it an analytics dashboard. We crunch location and time data in real-time to suggest and predict actions.

Here’s a use case from our biggest client and India's largest 3PL service provider when used LogiNext system:

Fuel Saved in a month: more than 20,000 dollars
Number of hours saved per day: 4.5
Shipments per day: 75,000

One of our most liked and used features is what we call “control room”. This is a combination of dashboards which can be viewed on large screens and gives a NASA-like centralized control room feeling where the operations team can sit and assist their field team in making better decisions on a minute-by-minute basis.

We have a SaaS-based pricing mechanism which is done per asset. An asset could be a vehicle, a bag of shipments, a delivery boy, a biker or even an individual shipment/transaction.

Our unique selling point is that we cater to all the legs of logistics such as intercity and intra-city with on-demand demands. This is done by few companies in India. We have collected a whopping 200 million plus data points. That’s a daunting task and a big milestone for a startup less than three years old.

Let’s talk funding now…

The founding team invested about 75 lakhs in the year of inception. Initially, we were bootstrapped which helped us to grow scale up and manage funds while expanding into competitive markets. We also raised a Series A round of 10 million dollars from PayTM in September 2015 and before that a pre- series A round of 500,000 dollars from the Indian Angel Network in April 2015.

What are/what will be your monetization paths?

Being an enterprise software company, we don’t give freebies to any of our customers which is one of the reasons for being operationally profitable. We charge license fees and our customers are happy with our pricing and services. We are a data -driven company, we track millions of shipments and procure heavy data and are a mature business model. In the near future, we may separate licensing and analytics. Also, we plan to have analytics within an industry for more in depth comparison and analysis.

Tell us how the business has grown so far

We have now grown to 638 customers and see 100% YoY customer growth. We have 5 prominent SaaS-based products – LogiNext MileTM; LogiNext ForceTM; LogiNext On - DemandTM; LogiNext ReverseTM, and LogiNext HaulTM.

In addition the company is proud to say that they have been operationally profitable since the start.

What marketing strategies and plans are in place to grow the business?

We have done organic marketing in our initial two years. For the past six months, we have created global visibility and are aiming to hit the international markets through our digital marketing initiatives.

Like SAP is synonymous with compliance, we want LogiNext to be synonymous with “movements and logistics”. We are becoming thought leaders and a lot of our top management are traveling worldwide to share their industry knowledge.

What are the market size and opportunity?

It’s a huge market for us. The spends on the logistics software have gone up worldwide. The global logi-tech market is more than 20 billion dollars and growing 20 per cent Year-on-Year. So in the coming years, the markets will expand rapidly.

We have started with selected industries such as retail, transport, and services. In the future, we will expand beyond this to other targeted industries.

Any challenges faced setting up? Anything unique to your situation?

Getting Initial customers was a daunting task for us. Started too young in the B2B sector and the enterprise CIOs found it difficult to trust the product [or the founders]. However, they started using our product because of the value addition and cost effectiveness while testing our product on their own platforms.

Basically explaining to businesses how our technology can help them save a lot of money helped us acquire our initial clients. Now, we have more referrals than cold calling.

When you’re handling other people’s inventory, it’s essential that our team know what they are doing. So, we train everyone from top management to the not - so educated drivers. It’s a strenuous task where you need to scale up or low according to the needs of various people. For this purpose, we have a good task force called Client Success Analysts, who are deployed to take care of the entire training process.

Share with us some best and worst memories while running the business.

One of our most awesome memories was when we were recently invited to meet three of the biggest CIOs across industries on the same day. Unfortunately we had to turn down two but it was indeed a moment of pride for us.

About the worst memories, every company makes some tough decisions that sometimes leaves bad taste but it’s part and parcel of how a company runs.