🚀 Medial Secures Investment on Shark Tank India - Fueling the Future of Professional Social Networking. 🔥
Login

News on Medial

Related News

Evify brings last-mile delivery to non-metro cities with EV logistics

EntrackrEntrackr · 1y ago
Evify brings last-mile delivery to non-metro cities with EV logistics
Medial

India’s electric vehicle market is set to be worth nearly $114 billion in 2029 with a CAGR of 66.5%, according to a report by Fortune Business Insights. The exponential growth in the EV space comes on the back of the government focus on sustainable mobility, increased VC capital infusion in the industry, and consumers’ wide embrace. Surat-based Evify is one of the relatively new startups that is looking to stand out with its strategy to focus on logistics in non-metro cities. Founded in 2021, Evify has essentially set up a facility where riders can come to their hub, pick up an EV to start deliveries, and return the vehicle at the end of the day. The company takes care of the maintenance of the vehicles. The startup currently operates in Surat and Ahmedabad, and has facilitated 11 lakh deliveries in the last one year. We spoke to the company co-founder and CEO Devrishi Arora to learn more about Evify, the idea behind the logistics EV startup, business model, and more. Here are the edited excerpts. What do you think are the key challenges in the emobility space? Since we come from a non-metro city, where the EV eco system is still at the nascent stage, there is no infrastructure available for the smooth functioning of the vehicles. There’s a scarcity of charging stations, inconveniencing EV users. Secondly, delivery riders lack awareness of EV benefits and savings. Thirdly, high initial EV costs, compounded by elevated RTO charges in states like Gujarat, and a scarcity of repair stations inflate expenses. Fourthly, concerns about EV range and charging infrastructure persist, particularly in Tier II cities with longer distances. Fifthly, limited availability of EVs and components, coupled with inadequate after-sales service, hampers adoption. Lastly, overcoming perceptions of EVs as less reliable requires client confidence, which we foster through pilot projects. How are you using technology to solve these challenges? We have also installed all the vehicles with telematics devices which helps us to geofence the vehicles, remote immobilization, study the rider driving pattern as well as idle time pattern of the riders. This has helped us to have control on our fleet as well as the riders. We have also been creating a full stack tech platform which will help us to study the rider analytics, battery analytics, BMS , IOT data, clients data, vendor data, ancillary industry data, repairs and maintenance, charging stations, etc under one single platform. How has your startup performed since inception? We started in September 2021 with just 30 vehicles and one client in Surat ie. Big Basket. Today, we have close to 500 vehicles servicing six major clients Zomato, Swiggy, Big Basket, Bluedart, Ecom Express, Flipkart in Surat and Ahmedabad. We are also launching our operations in Vadodara soon in the coming months. We have so far raised $1.3 million from GVFl and Piper Serica as the VC investors. The target is to have a fleet of 10,000 vehicles in the coming 2 years spread across 10 cities of Bharat. What are your short-term and long term goals? Our goals for the upcoming year involve expanding our presence in the four major cities of Gujarat and achieving a fleet size of 5,000 vehicles by the end of the next financial year. Additionally, we aim to establish the necessary EV ecosystem in these cities through collaborations with other EV players, fostering synergies, and raising awareness about this segment in Tier II cities. Looking ahead, our broader vision is to evolve into a green logistics service provider. This encompasses implementing green warehousing practices and facilitating first-mile, mid-mile, and last-mile deliveries using electric vehicles. Furthermore, we intend to partner with drop delivery services to offer comprehensive mid-mile delivery solutions to our clients.

uEngage aspires to be Shopify for restaurants in India

EntrackrEntrackr · 1y ago
uEngage aspires to be Shopify for restaurants in India
Medial

If you’re a new restaurant owner, you will probably get your joint listed on Zomato and Swiggy at the earliest. The listing helps with instant discoverability in the operational area and access to the delivery fleet among other benefits. The catch, however, is the steep commission charges restaurant owners have to pay these food aggregator platforms. This is one of the reasons why you see different pricing on Zomato and restaurants’ own menu cards. Chandigarh-based uEngage is looking to fix this exact problem for restaurant owners in the country. The startup offers a wide range of services such as Edge (which lets you start your own ordering app), Flash (which helps manage deliveries and riders), and Prism (which helps automate marketing). The startup is also active on ONDC, enabling businesses to join the open network for digital commerce. We spoke to uEngage CEO and founder Sameer Sharma to learn more about his platform, what it is trying to accomplish, and future roadmap. Here are the edited excerpts: What are the key problems that uEngage is trying to address? When Zomato, Swiggy, and other aggregators entered the picture, we couldn’t understand why they kept increasing commissions and pressuring merchants. Initially, it was 14%, which seemed high. Now, it’s beyond 22% for a major list of merchants, with some newer brands facing rates up to 32-35%. But that’s just the beginning. Beyond base commissions, there are additional costs like payment gateway charges, marketing click payments, often without clear, and cancellation charges without go ahead from the merchant. Recently, I met a leading Zomato-listed restaurant in Chandigarh. Despite generating sales worth Rs 30 lakh, they received only Rs 14.91 lakh, over 50% of their revenue. This has been happening for a while, and this is why we started uEngage. While aggregators offer great technology, demand generation, and modern logistics, there are downsides. Merchants lose control over brand positioning, customer relationship and face significant financial constraints. While aggregators aren’t necessarily evil, there’s much at stake for restaurants in the given circumstances. Please touch upon how the platform works, and how your growth has been so far? uEngage is Like Shopify for restaurants. Being a food-specific platform, we have been able to go deeper and offer extensive plug n play solutions to our restaurant partners. Initially launched as digital ordering platform for restaurants, uEngage has extended the platform into 3 different products covering: Direct Ordering (Mobile Apps, SEO First Websites, WhatsApp Ordering and KIOSk Ordering) – uEngage EDGE Customer Marketing and Omni Channel Loyalty – uEngage PRISM Last Mile Delivery and Tracking (Self Delivery and 3PL) – uEngage Flash At one end we have integrated industry leading POS and Billing Players like Petpooja , POSIST, Urban Piper, TM Bill, etc. to make life simpler for outlet staff, on the other end, we work closely with leading logistics players such as Dunzo, Zomato Xtreme (Zomato’s B2B service), Shadowfax, Loadshare, and Rapido. Together, they form a comprehensive Direct Ordering stack, including commerce, marketing, and logistics components. This ecosystem enables us to provide a holistic solution to our clients. As far as our financial growth goes, last year, our revenue stood at Rs 5.7 crore. This year, we anticipate closing it around Rs 13 crore to Rs 14 crore. This year, we’re projecting a GMV of around Rs 310 crore rupees for our brands. Orders from partner platforms to our revenue; they belong to the respective brands. However, they contribute to the GMV we generate for them. Our focus as a bootstrap company remains on profitability, and we’ve been profitable for more than two years now. Regarding our partnerships, we currently work with close to 4,000 outlets for our Direct Ordering Business and overall 15000+ Outlets for all our offerings including ONDC. What are your plans for the ONDC network? The ONDC is still at a nascent stage but a significant contributor to our revenue. Currently, we have around 15,000 outlets. Our target is to reach 50,000 outlets within the next three to four quarters.

No hurry to sell, indefinite horizon on Zomato holding: Sanjeev Bikhchandani

EntrackrEntrackr · 1y ago
No hurry to sell, indefinite horizon on Zomato holding: Sanjeev Bikhchandani
Medial

Info Edge, India’s largest and most storied recruitment portal, has had a stellar run in the last three years with its portfolio company Zomato’s market cap surging almost 2.3X since its stock exchange debut. The firm’s bet on fintech unicorn Policybazaar is also paying off well. The company has made it clear it is in no hurry to book profits on these investments, even as it continues to nurse its own brands beyond Naukri to profitability. The firm, one of the few to survive the dotcom boom and bust cycle of 2000, has been led by founder and chairman Sanjeev Bikhchandani for a large part of this journey. And today, Bikhchandani has earned the right to be looked up to as the statesman for the sector. Entrackr caught up with Bikhchandani in his Gurugram office and he spoke on a range of topics including Naukri, Info Edge’s investments, serial entrepreneurs and corporate governance. Here are the edited excerpts. As a listed firm that carries a heavy overhang from its investment portfolio, does it worry you that it might impact the valuation of the core Naukri business? Not really. Institutional investors are smart. We give them adequate data so that they analyze Naukri thoroughly before making a conclusion about valuation. We don’t run Naukri for valuation every day or month or quarter. We look at how we create value for our shareholders in the long run. And that’s how we run our businesses. So, this hypothesis about our core or even group business doesn’t stand. Info Edge has been an investor in Zomato for over 14 years and despite the latter’s share price rising nearly 14o% from its listing price, Info Edge didn’t sell its shares. What level of return are you anticipating from Zomato? Actually, we don’t calculate Investment Return Rate (IRR). Info Edge invested in Zomato because of our conviction that it could become a great company. And if you are convinced about your conviction then it will happen. So, IRR is the happy incidental outcome of investing early behind companies that you want to help. That’s my belief. We are not in any hurry to sell and have an indefinite horizon. Every VC firm has a fund cycle and pressure to return capital to their limited partners but that’s not the case with Info Edge as you are investing from your own balance sheet. Could you elaborate on this? That pressure does not make this choice. We have a long term horizon and we call it patient capital. To be a successful early stage investor in India, you have to be quite patient because companies take anywhere between 10-15 years to go to IPO from seed stage. So if you have funds for only 6-10 years, you will not realize the full fruits of your investment. If you have a 20 year fund, you tend to perform better. However, such a horizon could be possible only when you’re investing from your own whole balance sheet. Do you believe that Blinkit could become bigger than Zomato? I think both are large but Blinkit is going to be fairly large. If we look at Zomato’s quarter-on-quarter numbers, online food ordering appears to have stagnated in top 10-15 cities. What’s your take on this? Obviously, there is the base effect. But, we don’t see stagnation. Also, you need to compare year-on-year, not quarter-on-quarter. When YoY numbers are compared, there is growth. I think full fiscal year performance is more important than quarter. We used to commonly hear about Naukri’s recruitment business that it was not the online presence, but your sales force or feet on the street that made the difference. Does that still hold true? Online sales have never been a big part of our strategy. When you want to sell more expensive products, you need face-to-face contact. At Naukri, we have clients whom we bill several crore rupees for annual subscription and such accounts need heavy offline touch. While the product will be consumed online, the stuff around it very often will be offline. Over the years, several players have tried to crack the recruitment business in the blue collar segment but most of them died. What are the challenges in the segment? Blue collar segment has broadly three challenges. First, it’s hyperlocal. The job seekers in this segment don’t move to different cities as they look for opportunities in and around their locality. Second, very often there isn’t a detailed text CV which makes the process slow and inefficient. Third, potential workforce in the segment do not search for jobs on the laptop and use vernacular languages. They are mostly on mobile. So you’ve got to adapt to all these things and still somehow get revenue and profit. We have been trying to get inroads in the blue collar segment for over two years now but we have just started monetizing it. Our future position in the segment depends on monetization. Some of the celebrated entrepreneurs are launching a second or third company without their first startup churning profit. How do you see this trend? I think this isn’t a progressive trend. As an entrepreneur, you need to focus on one thing and do really well. Once you’ve cracked that you can add on a second thing in the same company. Over the past couple of years, we have witnessed corporate governance issues with some startups. Even Info Edge saw serious lapses at 4B Networks. What’s your opinion about this? By and large, my belief is that 95-98% of Indian founders are genuine but there will be a few bad examples. Investors make sure that when something wrong happens in their portfolio, it is highlighted and actions are taken to ensure that such incidents do not repeat. Any governance issue isn’t good for anyone including limited partners, investors, founders and the startup ecosystem. What factors contributed to the lack of success with Info Edge’s e-commerce investments 99labels, MyDala, and Happily Unmarried? Limitation of raising foreign direct investment (FDI) and heavy investment into competition were two major reasons for failure of 99labels while MyDala had a product market fit (PMF) issue. Happily Unmarried is now a part of VLCC and we are still a shareholder there.

Download the medial app to read full posts, comements and news.