LCV marketplace Shipler plans to raise $2.5 million

Will use funds to expand to 25 cities

Shipler, a mobile-based platform for booking light commercial vehicles (LCVs), is planning to raise $2.5 million. The company, which has received seed capital from Snapdeal founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal, is in advanced talks with venture capital (VC) firms for the proposed fund-raising, which will be utilised to extend its reach to 25 cities.  

While Kaustub Pandey, co-founder of Shipler, refused to disclosed the names of the VC firms with which talks are being held, he said the first set of announcement will come over the next two-three months.

Shipler was co-founded by Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay alumni Pandey, Vinay Julme, Kartik Kacholia, Pratibha Pathania and Sudheer Jhajhria. Pandey has worked with SoftBank-backed Housing.com for a year.

Shipler already works with corporate clients such as Future Supply Chain, Snapdeal, and iDelivery. It competes with Porter, Moovo, Shippr, Zaicus, Blowhorn and others.

Shipler has a client-facing app in which people post their requirements and a driver-facing app, which receives notifications on the basis of global positioning system, or GPS, location. The app allows users to track their shipment.

The company started its operations in Mumbai and expanded to Delhi, Hyderabad and Pune and plans to increase it to 20-25 cities, said Pandey.

Shipler has already tied up with around 700 small and medium enterprise (SME) retail shops. Around 40 per cent of the bookings are made through the mobile app, while the remaining come via call-based support.

The company is planning to expand to 10 cities within a year including Chennai and Bengalaru. Its target is to have 5,000 orders a day in these cities.

Over the next two years, the company wants to increase its reach to 20-25 cities and has an ambitious target of 20,000 orders a day, compared with 140 at present.

The company is also betting big on e-commerce, for which it plans to come up with automated logistics planning and demand-based shipment scheduler.

Shipler generates revenue on every order that goes through its platform. Currently, it is mostly working with SMEs. The average ticket size is Rs 500, of which Shipler charges 12-20 per cent from the transporter / driver. Shipler doesn't charge the customer.