Rivigo raising Rs 141.97 cr from SAIF Partners, Spring Canter Investment

Technology-enabled logistics firm Rivigo is raising Rs 141.97 crore from SAIF Partners India VI Limited and Spring Canter Investment Limited. The Gurugram-based firm issued 5,086 Series-F compulsorily convertible preference shares of the face value of Rs 10 each and premium of 2,79,143 each to SAIF and Spring, according to the regulatory documents filed by the company, which were sourced from business intelligence platform Tofler.

Rivigo was started in 2014 by McKinsey alumnus Deepak Garg and Gazal Kalra. It has so far raised multiple rounds of funding to strengthen its technology and network coverage and build its patented relay-trucking network. The company became a ‘unicorn,’ or a startup valued at more than $1 billion in September this year after it raised $4.9 million from South Korea-based KB Global Platform Fund. In July, this year the firm raised a funding of $65 million in its ongoing series E round, led by existing investors Warburg Pincus and SAIF Partners.

Rivigo is building Relay-as-a-Service (RaaS) to directly address the inefficiencies in trucking and solve for the challenges faced by fleet owners and truck pilots in the country. Relay trucking is an operating model where drivers change over after every few hundred kilometres of driving through a network of relay pit-stops and then get rostered back to their home base to return to their families every single day. Besides helping in higher truck utilisation, the firm is also offering its solutions related to fuel, maintenance and cashless payments,  available to fleet owners in the country.

According to the Economic Survey 2017-18, the Indian logistics sector provides a livelihood to more than 22 million people. Boosting the sector will facilitate a 10 per cent decrease in indirect logistics costs, leading to a growth of 5 to 8 per cent in exports. Further, the Survey estimates that the worth of the Indian logistics market would be around $215 billion in the next two years compared to about $160 billion currently.

In October this year, Rivigo had said that it expects to break even by end of FY20. The company said that it added Rs 300 crore to its topline registering a 45 per cent annual growth last year.

The same month, the company reported its revenues for the financial year 2018-19 at Rs 1,029 crore, a 43 per cent jump since the last financial year, according to Tofler. The company further reported a net loss of Rs 510 crore during the same fiscal. This was a 108 per cent increase from the last financial year. The company’s total expenses for the fiscal were reported as Rs 1,540 crore, according to Tofler.