Logistics management platform,
Locus, has raised $2.75 million in Series A funding led by Exfinity Venture Partners with participation from Blume Ventures, BeeNext and Rajesh Ranavat (MD, Fung Capital). Existing investors also participated in this round. The startup received seed funding from growX, Bhupen Shah, Manish Singhal, Amit Ranjan and others mid last year.
Locus enables enterprises with technology to manage their deliveries, with features including, automated smart dispatches, tracking, and fleet visualization, proprietary geocoder and proprietary route deviation engine. The funding will be used to strengthen its technology offerings and expand the team.
The startup helps local companies and enterprises in courier, eCommerce, food delivery, FMCG and other verticals to optimize their logistics. The startup offers two capabilities to clients - to Build - using a cluster of APIs, to enable developers embed it into their apps, and track delivery using Locus’ platform, and to Customize, that large clients can brand for themselves.
Balakrishnan V, Chairman, Exfinity Venture Partners and ex CFO of Infosys, joins the Locus board. Commenting on the investment, he says, “The logistics industry in India is evolving rapidly and it is the interplay of infrastructure, technology and new types of service providers that will define whether the industry is able to help its customers reduce their logistics costs and provide effective services. This provides an opportunity to solve these problems in a fundamentally different way using algorithms with greater opportunity for optimization. The Locus solution is built by factoring real world fuzziness to support iffy networks, inaccurate addresses and hundreds of other exception scenarios. It can also club orders in real-time re-routing to maximize throughput.”
Sanjay Nath, Co-founder & Managing Partner, Blume Ventures, puts it succinctly, “Last-mile delivery remains a vital pain point for e-commerce and logistics. We're excited by Locus' deep-tech platform driven approach, and are glad to be partners in their growth journey".
Nishith Rastogi, Co-founder & CEO, Locus, adds, “Supply chain, delivery and logistics are critical challenges and key to competitive advantage for enterprises. We at Locus, have created high-end algorithms & systems, unlike any existing solution, to take care of this problem so businesses can focus on offering their customers a delightful experience.”
Urban Ladder has been one of the earliest users of Locus. Kaustubh Chakraborty, Vice President, Operations, Urban Ladder, says, “Locus is a fantastic product with a clear interface for easy adoption and usage. For a customer focused, fast growing company like ours, management of on-time, efficient deliveries is super important. Locus has helped improve our productivity by 25% in 3 months. The team has been very engaged and committed towards finding solutions for problems specific to us.”
Locus provides solutions for on demand businesses for dispatching, route optimization, real-time driver tracking, managing the on-field workforce, mobile messaging, ETAs, tracking and sms alerts for end-customers and predictive analytics. The company offers the entire logistics technology stack in the form of a PAAS (platform as a service).
Locus was founded mid last year, by Nishith Rastogi (BITS Pilani alumnus) and Geet Garg (IIT Kharagpur alumnus), who worked together at Amazon, and has emerged from RideSafe, an app they built over a route deviation engine for travel safety for women. The core team at Locus comprises ex-AWS engineers and PhDs from TIFR with rich experience in data science, mobile and design.
