Logistics startup BlackBuck, which looks to give India a digital logistics and freight upgrade, just recently closed a $70 million Series C round of venture funding.
BlackBuck’s latest funding round was led by Sands Capital, with additional participation from the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation, Accel and India’s local eCommerce giant Flipkart. To date, the logistics startup has raised $130 million in four funding rounds.
BlackBuck’s play to upgrade India’s logistics space is to connect organizations looking to move goods with truck drivers looking to maximize their hauls via on-demand digital marketplace — think of it as an Uber for logistics, similar in use case to the the systems that Uber (naturally) and retail giant Amazon are working to create stateside.
It’s easy to see Flipkart’s interest in the logistics revolution BlackBuck is working toward — not only to optimize its own delivery operations but also to compete against challenger Amazon on India’s growing eCommerce playing field.
BlackBuck estimates that road-based options account for 63 percent of all freight in India, said TechCrunch, with a current spend of around $140 billion per year. But while trucking is big business in the nation of over 1.2 billion, these operations remain largely fragmented. But the problem also exists outside the nation’s borders.
“The problem is universal — it’s global in nature,” said cofounder and CEO Rajesh Yabaji in an interview. “But we need to completely crack this business model in our country first. The timing has to be right.”
As of now, BlackBuck reportedly works with over 100,000 individual trucks in 300 locations in India. On the client end, BlackBuck reportedly enables enterprises such as Asian Paints, Unilever, Coca-Cola and Britannia.
With the haul from the recent Series C, BlackBuck reportedly looks to improve its technology on its home turf while setting its sights on one day growing its services in another major emerging eCommerce market: Southeast Asia.
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