Ever questioned how every day provides or shopper items attain the villages and talukas of rural India from the commercial cities and manufacturing hubs? Sharath Chandangoudar and Amit Akkihal did. So they studied the marketplace for last-mile supply in rural India, recognized the stakeholders and the bottlenecks, and based Tusker Transport in 2019, an intra-regional B2B last-mile logistics and transportation aggregator platform for owner-operated vans and micro-entrepreneurs primarily based in tier-II, III and IV cities. With a transporter pool of over 12,000 autos, Tusker at this time companies distant rural districts of Karnataka, Maharashtra and Goa, aiming to offer last-mile supply options throughout 6,000 pincodes by the top of 2024.
“We are focusing on rural markets where 70% of the retail consumption happens. Our clients are from across sectors – agricultural inputs, FMCG, textiles, pharmaceutical products, consumer durables, construction hardware, etc. – basically anything and everything which wholesalers and distributors need to transport to retailers in rural India,” says Amit Akkihal, co-founder and CEO. Tusker at this time serves round 750 pincodes.
The transporters, all crowdsourced, kind a hub-and-spoke mannequin which has elastic capability, catering to the variable calls for of channel companions. The channel companions are micro-entrepreneurs, principally wholesalers and distributors who take up 300-350 sq ft of ground house as micro-depots and want to move items over 60-200 km. Since Tusker’s expertise platform permits for aggregation of demand throughout a big set of every day clients, it is ready to consolidate the a great deal of a number of shippers onto every truck and move these cost-efficiencies on to clients. It affords monitor and hint facility to its shoppers moreover waybill and tax compliance and entry to commerce finance.
“We plan to expand to new markets in Karnataka, Goa and Maharashtra, and also to two market clusters in Tamil Nadu, one cluster in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, and one in Gujarat,” says Akkihal. “We are servicing 50,000 customers now, thus catering to a population of 20 mn, and will take it to 300,000 in the next one year,” he provides.
The Bengaluru-based startup had acquired non-equity funding from the Shell Foundation and grants through the Innovation Prize from MIT in 2018. It is trying to shut Series A funding in August. It claims to have achieved an ARR (annual recurring income) of $1 million with Rs 2,000-crore GMV (Gross Merchandise Value) turnover.
Source: www.financialexpress.com”