This IITian is turning traditional shipping on its head with automation

Soham Chokshi's Shipsy is disrupting the offline shipping space with its SaaS workflow management platform

It was just another day at work for IITian Soham Chokshi, who had boarded a metro train to deliver a package from one side of Delhi to another. During the journey, Chokshi gave up his seat for a child he spotted in the crowd. The kid’s father thanked him, noticed his blue shirt, and enquired about his company. This stranger from the train led an angel round of funding in Chokshi’s on-demand logistics service platform Shipsy. Dheeraj Jain, a partner at UK-based hedge fund Redcliffe Capital, was so impressed with Shipsy that he got along a bunch of angel investors to invest in the firm in less than a month.

Co-founded in 2015 by Chokshi and fellow IITians Dhruv Agarwal, Himanshu Gupta, and Sahil Arora, Shipsy’s platform helps enterprises manage their end-to-end logistics across multiple modes and also collaborate more efficiently with their vendors onboarded on the platform. The team has set out to build the largest supply chain network by bringing all participants such as exporters, importers, third party logistics, shipping lines, banks, insurance companies on a single platform. 

After completing his B Tech from IIT Madras, Chokshi landed a job in Deutsche Bank where his role demanded high involvement in coding financial models. Although he had no prior experience in coding, he wasn't going to give up so easily and worked more than 16 hours a day to learn the stuff.

During his tenure at Deutsche Bank, he started a company called Mappr and sold it in 2015 before starting Shipsy. He founded Shipsy along with his team to bring in the unique change in the logistics industry with the use of technology, data, AI at scale. “During the initial years of business, I myself used to deliver some packages to the customers,” says Chokshi.

Today his company has a network module for SME-MSME and onboarded over 5,000 shippers giving them access to the digital platform with competitive vendors and help lower their cost. It recently raised $6 million in the latest funding round (Series A) led by Sequoia’s Surge. While its network boasts of large petrochemical, steel, rice and textile exporters, revenues have grown over three-fold in the last year-and-a-half. The company's customer base has increased 2x during the lockdown period alone, as enterprises look out for digital solutions to manage shipments. 

While trillions of dollars are being spent in global trade to move tens of trillions of dollars worth of goods, despite the enormous volume, there exist no digital layer of communication standards across the globe. 

“Our approach is to create a strong SaaS workflow management platform that allows network participants to collaborate and work together, reducing process bottlenecks, enhancing efficiency and bringing transparency,” says Chokshi.

The Gurugram-headquartered firm has customers across Dubai, Saudi Arabia, North Africa, Singapore and Malaysia among others. “Shipsy’s team has a customer-first approach and its software product removes opacity in the logistics supply chain for enterprises, using intuitive workflow automation. The product has seen great adoption from large Indian as well as overseas corporates, with significant cost reduction for them. We are excited to continue backing the team as Shipsy is evolving into a global B2B product being built and scaled from India," said Sanjeev Bikhchandani, Founder and Executive Vice Chairman of Info Edge, which is also an investor in the company.