These Two Guys Have Started The Biggest Logistics Aggregator. Ever.

Vamaship was launched in October 2015 with an objective to revolutionise the fragmented logistics industry. Vamaship is helping save over 20% of shipping cost and a fair percentage of time of the logistics team in companies, says Rohit who is responsible for the seamless user experience of Vamaship software.

The founders have resumes that are such impressive reads. Bhavik Chinai, founder and CEO has won the Economic Times – Young Supply Chain Professional of the Year award. Oh, yes, he is also an angel investor and actively funds through BVC Ventures.

Rohit Chemburkar, cofounder and chief technical officer on the other has an eye for innovative technological solutions and spearheads the Vamaship tech team.

Bhavik and Rohit speaks more about their endeavour.

Why did you decide to start this venture?

The logistics industry has been unorganised for decades and there’s a major gap between shippers and logistics companies. Shippers don’t have much information on what is a good price for shipping and don’t receive great service, while logistics companies aren’t able to reach out to thousands of companies across geographies due to limited sales resources.

So, to eliminate the major gap between shippers and logistics companies, Vamaship was started as an IT solution to create a win-win for all stakeholders, creating a new sales channel for logistics companies and bringing economical prices and automated shipping processes for the shippers.

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

Vamaship is the world’s first integrated logistics platform, facilitating shipping via air, ocean and surface for businesses. Vamaship is a one stop shipping platform for ecommerce logistics, courier, air freight, ocean freight, full truckload and part truckload. Through more than 100 logistics partners, Vamaship facilitates these services in over 10,000 pin codes in India and to 200 countries from and to India. That’s how we are different from our competitors.

How did you manage to fund this idea?

We’ve raised $500K from BVC Ventures which is a group entity as the first round to expand in India.

What are/what will be your monetization paths?

We’re a profitable company on gross level and experiencing growth in revenue from over 500 businesses. We earn revenue from all services and have a margin in each.

Tell us how the business has grown so far

As we were saying, we have over 500 businesses as customers and offer seven services as an integrated shipping platform. The services are domestic ecommerce, international ecommerce, air freight, full container load (FCL) by ocean, less than container load (LCL) by ocean, full truckload (FTL) and part truckload (PTL). We’re making a healthy gross margin on each shipment.

The automated shipping platform is free for businesses and we earn on each transaction.

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

We’re using a combination of online and offline strategies to grow our presence. We use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn - though logistics isn’t the best sold service on social platforms, we’re seeing an incredible inbound interest from home based sellers and merchants selling through their Facebook page and Instagram handles.

For offline, we’ve collaborated with many trade associations and are creating a win-win with each member of all these associations. Also, word of mouth has helped with a lot of referrals to small and large businesses.

What is the market size and opportunity?

Logistics is a multi-trillion dollar industry globally, and we’re only starting from India. We aim to be the world’s shipping partner and the opportunity is exciting for all Vamashippers.

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

The core challenge we faced is adoption of technology by traditional players. Despite partners having access to excellent software which can stream real-time data, it’s adopted only by a fraction of industry due to foreseen implementation challenges and slow return of investment. As a marketplace, Vamaship’s success depends on adoption of technology by partners which is taking time. This has been a major challenge.

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

Each memory has either helped elevate Vamaship or helped us learn, and we consider each memory of the past 11 months as only great memories. One great memory is when the world’s third largest bauxite mining company agreed to partner with Vamaship, which validated our model in the first few months.

Another great memory was when a growing ecommerce business called ‘The Label Life’ promoted by celebrities shifted their entire logistics to Vamaship and our value additions made an incredible impact on their growth directly.