Indian Economy News

Gururaj gets Foxconn, Flipkart, Accel backing

Mumbai/Bangalore: Ravi Gururaj, a serial entrepreneur-turned-investor who heads Nasscom's Product Council, is back donning the entrepreneur's hat. Gururaj's latest venture QikPod, which is ready to go live, has roped in a stellar set of financial and strategic investors, including the Taiwanese manufacturer of Apple iPhones, Foxconn, Silicon Valley venture fund Accel Partners, Flipkart and Delhivery. These investors are pumping $9 million, or about Rs 60 crore, into QikPod's first round of funding, one of the largest cheques to come in for a yet-to-be-launched startup.

Gururaj, one of the most recognizable faces in the country's startup ecosystem, is setting up a network of fully automated, self-serve lockers in residential complexes, office compounds, cafes and kirana stores across the country, starting from Bangalore, to ease the delivery process for online retailers. Gururaj told TOI that QikPod's network and services will be made available to all couriers and e-commerce companies in the country.

Gururaj's idea is to help e-commerce players overcome the problem of failed deliveries, a pain point for most e-tailers globally, making the last-mile logistics less complicated. QikPod is poised to create greater consumer convenience and substantially reduce last-mile delivery costs, along with the benefit of cutting carbon emissions through shortened and fewer delivery routes, Gururaj told TOI. QikPod plans to install 50,000 lockers across the country which can be set up in varying sizes, starting from a low-footprint 10-compartment column to hundreds of compartments across a large parcel locker room. These can be installed in the receptions and lobbies of apartment buildings and offices as well as in retail locations such as coffee shops and grocery stores. The service is currently free to consumers as well as for locations and sites that wish to install and host a locker.

Gururaj said, "I had always planned to jump back into building a venture, but took a while to identify a tangible, valuable and large growing problem area where I could build an innovative company." He said the new venture won't impact his role at Nasscom where he will continue to serve on the executive council and as chair of the product council.

"There is a dire need for a more convenient shipping alternative to home delivery to sustain the high growth in e-commerce and hyperlocal categories. A connected locker is a simple and effective solution to this problem. For consumers, there will be no more hassles of payments, returns, coordinating timings with delivery staff, and for the e-tailers, this will finally enable true economies of scale," said Prashanth Prakash, partner, Accel Partners.

In India, Amazon, the e-commerce behemoth, uses kirana stores and other pick-up points in an indigenous improvisation on Amazon Lockers, which the company operates in the US and some other markets. Amazon Lockers act as self-delivery locations to pick up parcels from. Others like hyperlocal delivery player Roadrunnr launched 'Mailbox' recently to help cater to the problem of missed deliveries for its e-commerce clients. Indian e-commerce industry is likely to cross the $100-billion mark in terms of sales over the next five years, from $17 billion at present, according to an Assocham-PricewaterhouseCoopers study, and would require a robust delivery and logistics backend to reach that scale.

Gururaj has earlier founded five ventures, two of which were acquired by Nasdaq-listed US technology companies. He founded VMLogix, a virtualization management solution for private and public cloud, which was acquired by Citrix in 2010.

Disclaimer: This information has been collected through secondary research and IBEF is not responsible for any errors in the same.

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