The number of occasions on which one wishes to speed up the entire delivering process is only increasing every year. Hyderabad based startup VDeliver is providing pickup and delivery services for Hyderabadis. Telugu360 is in conversation with founders of the hyperlocal logistics startup Srinivas Madhavam and A S K Chaitanya Reddy…
Can you quickly walk us through your journey?
In 2011, there was hardly any micro logistic services. Especially when I was sick in Chennai, nobody would deliver tablets to me despite offering to pay decently for the services. I faced few such incidents, only to realize the need for deliver services. When the competition is between time vs money, it’s often time that wins. So, we started in Chennai as Vdeliver – we delivery anything, anywhere and anytime. But later we realized the loop holes and rectified them. Now we offer Anything that is legal, anywhere within the city limits and anytime 11:00am to 11:00pm. We are B2B and often B2C for few individuals for whom time wins over money.
When did the shift to Hyderabad happen?
I started in Chennai because I was working there and I got Vodafone my client over there. Telugu being my communication channel primarily, I soon shifted to Hyderabad. Towards 2013 end we started off fresh in Hyderabad. In Chennai, we had a very small foot print. Now we are planning to aggressively expand in Chennai and later Pune.
You are doing point to point delivery and there are many such service providers in the city. How do you set yourself apart?
There are around 10-11 services but what sets us apart is our range. We serve almost all the pin codes in the city. In fact, one of our USP is we deliver anywhere in Hyderabad. Our competition does anywhere between 4-5deliveries per delivery person, whereas we do somewhere between 10-12. Our unit economics is pretty stronger than anyone in the market.
How are you able to do so many deliveries?
We are targeting to reach around 18deliveries per executive. That’s where technology comes into place where in Semi-automatic allocation and automatic allocation of executives happens. We are going to use machine learning and Artificial Intelligence into our tech. For example, the probability of one executive visiting the same location is less despite being a regular customer. To avoid the burden of address issues, wasting time to find address and improve the ease of delivery, our AI and machine learning techniques will help us in allocation of executives.
How many business is you servicing?
Around 75 businesses are using our services in 18 different segments only in Hyderabad. We reached 250000 orders. Active businesses are 35 and then there are seasonal business like Haleem season or Diwali.
Can you tell us about funding?
We were bootstrapped for around 2 years. Later in 2015 Boss consulting group raised seed funding. We raised angel funding in January from Hyderabad-based KLCP Holdings and Australia-based Boss Consulting. We raised a Pre-Series A funding round led by Corvus Ventures and Mumbai-based MAPE Advisory Group in July.
With the recent funding, you are planning to strengthen your portfolio and bring in new services. So, what are the new services?
Invitation delivery services is one of them where in we go personally invite people to attend wedding or event. We need highly qualified personnel to do it than a regular executive. Another thing is, we are getting into QR code scanning for pick-up and delivery services.
Is there any specific customer you want to talk about?
1mg is one of the largest vendor for us. We are delivering around 90% of their logistics services. Our customers are premium set who understand that dynamics of delivery. We are logistics partner for OyeHappy.
What’s the most challenging thing?
Convincing client to pay for the cost and margin. There have been many concierge services who shut down in the recent past. They were offering services for low cost. Persuading a customer to pay more after they have experienced a service for low cost is challenging. We have to explain the client the entire dynamics for our costing, which we have done several times.
What’s keeping you busy?
We may soon get into blood delivery services. We want to pick up blood from blood bank, package it as per the standards and deliver it to hospitals. We are yet to start the negotiations and speak about compliances to carry blood and emergency medicine and surgical on two-wheeler with a siren. Nevertheless Vdeliver continues to keep us busy.
