Enable entrepreneurship through logistic

The Logistics and transportation sector in India remains fragmented and prone to inefficiencies. The sector is still unorganized with poor working conditions, and adds a 13% cost to GDP annually. This drastically impacts bottom lines of SMEs and makes business vulnerable due to uncertainty of supplies. Also, due to market inefficiencies and lack of transparency, drivers are usually exploited and are paid on terms of their vendors. 

We are committed to solving this issue through integrated service model that counters variability and uncertainty and provides real time cost efficient logistics solution to our customers. We as platform eliminate middle men from the chain, thus making the whole supply chain more efficient and transparent for our customers. 

Studies suggest that this has encouraged entrepreneurship by making businesses hassle free and more efficient.

This has also resulted in increase in driver earnings and raise their aspirations of becoming micro-entrepreneur themselves.

Logistics has huge impact on domestic economy of any country. India’s spend on logistics industry is 13% (~350bnUSD) of GDP, higher than any developing country, yet sector is extremely inefficient due to industry fragmentation and lack of infrastructure. 

Sector employs 16.7million workforce, estimated to employ 28.4million by 2022, still remains largely unattractive due-to unorganized nature of sector, characterized by poor working conditions and low pay scale. We aim solve this through standard payment terms and initiatives to up-skill, train our workforce. Also, our drivers have seen increased earnings by completing more trips, which we offer by leveraging technology.

Supply side is unreliable and is riddled with primitive technology, as a result, simplest of logistic transfers are inconsistent, disproportionately expensive and thus economically unattractive for the business owner. We have been improving unit economics for our customers to an extent that we are able to convert logistics to profit center for customers from being cost center. 

Another important constraint that sector is facing is lack of performance standards. This is traditionally due to diverse requirements and expectations owing to diverse customer base. There is a need for speed, integration of services, initiatives such as real time tracking, report dashboards, other value-added-services.

We as platform eliminate middle men from the chain, and enable an increase in earning of drivers with fixed contracts. This has helped raise their aspiration of becoming a micro-entrepreneur themselves.

The industry standard of payout of drivers is 45-60 days, which makes it difficult for drivers to pay their bills and run their household. Our driver partners are paid out their monthly salary on a fortnightly basis, which improves their lifestyle as well as helps them run their households without getting short term loans from lenders.

We have developed integrated service model that counters variability and uncertainty on both the demand and the supply side and provides a real time cost efficient logistics solution to the customers. We have pioneered the fixed and spot market and converted fixed pricing models to variable package based pricing models, this helps save our customers up-to 20% on logistics cost. 

Also, we are breaking the barriers of same day delivery and offering 4-6 hour intra-city delivery services through our decentralized warehouses that harness the power big data and ML based predictive modelling. As a result of this, we help improve unit economics for the customers.

We have a roster of 30,000 minitruck drivers who dominate intracity logistics in India. We engage in direct talks with them to understand their problems and track these metrics every year on a granular level. 

This has resulted in aforesaid results. We have increased their gross earnings to the tune of 20% which almost doubles the take home of the driver entrepreneurs which in turn is spent on family upliftment in health and education. 10% of our driver partners are able to buy a second vehicle and 40% are able to provide for their children’s education.

We provide customized logistics services to SMEs to allow them to compete with larger entities with same day delivery services. After engaging with them and understanding their needs, we have developed integrated service solutions that democratize the logistics industry. This gives businesses of all sizes access to visibility, variability and velocity across the supply chain, thus reducing their logistics cost by ~20%.

Currently we are operational in around 50 cities in India. We aim to expand to tier 2 and tier 3 cities fairly quickly, where SMEs are struggling for cost effective solutions to expand their enterprise and drivers are offered minimal pay scale.

The problem that we are catering to is to create good jobs and inclusive entrepreneurship. We do this through our logistics business where we give employment to drivers, pay them on a fortnightly basis and train and upskill them.

On customer side, we have leveraged our technology to ensure supply chain becomes a profit centre for our customers. This we feel will give confidence to a large section of population who want to become entrepreneurs but consider the business unprofitable for low margin due to supply chain issues.

We offer 4-5 hour intra-city delivery services through our decentralized micro-warehouses, with 70% of our orders delivered within 8 hours. So instead of a big warehouse somewhere outside the city, we have deployed multiple micro warehouses in the heart of city. This we have able to do by converting small shops or storage space of restaurants into micro-warehouses. This also significantly brings down cost of inventory holding for customers.

Also, we have adopted franchisee model for expansion into tier 2 and tier 3 cities. This has enabled us to cover 50+ cities in less than 

We offer tech enabled services across all business lines. We offer real time visibility on the assets, track and trace, demand predictability. Our service levels have improved the timeliness by 25%, implying a higher satisfaction for the end consumer. We have been able to provide our customers with unparalleled reach enabling them to scale faster.

Blowhorn banks heavily on the suite of internal and external products to cater to the intra-city logistics needs of the market in an asset light fashion. The key components include

1. Customer App / Fleet Dashboard: A marketplace app (Web, iOS and Android) to facilitate logistics within the city. A fleet dashboard where owners can manage their payments, wallets, vehicles, assets and live tracking of vehicles, reports, etc.

Microwarehouse/store operations can also use this to manage inventory, fulfilment of orders. API integration possible for customers who wish to do real-time integrations with Blowhorn

2. Driver Partner App: This is used by our drivers/partner to make deliveries. It has capabilities to perform simple transportation like the first mile or middle mile. Has warehousing capabilities to do receiving scanning of barcode, QR, track of pallets, movements visibility to the end customer (including B2B)

3. Admin/Cosmos App: An ERP that facilitates onboarding of supply, defining customer contracts with buy and sell rates, automated driver payments, customer invoices, CRM, collections and finance modules. Mix of Web, Android and iOS apps internal to Blowhorn

Deep-Tech

Drone - We have built and tested drone based deliveries in university campuses which can deliver 500 grams of food  deliveries (india proofed) like sandwiches, samosas. This still has regulatory challenges on operations at commercial scale, so is currently managed and operated by university students

IoT - We use Blowhorn android partner app to track driver location, typical stoppages, delays and alerts which help us manage operations on exception basis

We are already using the technology to run our day to day business. We offer APIs for managing and creating orders. This can be seen on https://api.blowhorn.com/

Some of our customers and services are listed on our website

https://blowhorn.com/

Bring the entrepreneurial spirit in blue collar / gig workers in indian ecosystem through activities like

Increase skills through using the driver app, cash management, see payments (Simplicity, Ability to use as a semi literate are core goals of the driver partner app)

Professional attitude and recognition within the driver community to be working for a reputed company (Branding, Carrying ID Cards, QR Scanning and timely reporting and customer interactions increase self esteem)

Through these, we expect the driver community will be able to showcase professionalism, thus standardizing and increasing their payouts in the medium term.

Also, with professional drivers, the SME community would be more confident of their supplies reaching on time and hence this would increase entrepreneurship spirit in tier 2 and tier 3 cities with reliable and fast logistics network.

We are providing our end to end logistics services to 100+ Enterprise customers and 3000+ enterprise customers.

We expect to touch 300+ enterprise customers and 7000+ non enterprise customers in the next one year. 

We have consistently grown 2X every year, and we expect to increase our customer base to 1000+ enterprise customers and 20000+ non enterprise customers in the next 5 years

We have also built up our driver fleet from 4,000 in 2016 to 30,000 drivers as on date. We are looking to increase our driver fleet to 45,000 by 2021 and to 100,000 in next 5 years

The Indian intra city logistics market is around USD 35 Billion Dollars currently.

The majority of the intra city logistics market is split into 40% (Enterprise) and 60%(SME). We have only scratched 5% of the market, as the industry is still fragmented and the market is still dominated by local vendors. Our main target is to increase our reach to 500+ cities in the next 5 years.

Most LCV owners are single truck owners. Capacity utilization of the asset is 25% which is very poor for an asset. Most of them get a single trip without any return load. 

The Indian consumer is shifting to a same day delivery (5-6 Hours from placement of order) mindset and the Indian logistics ecosystem is not equipped to cater to this demand.

Also, the drivers have been traditionally used to work in unorganized fashion and retaining them on our platform by giving them enough trips throughout the year remains a challenge when demand is low. This leads to a bit higher deployment time as compared to when markets are moving up. This would increase acquisition cost as it would require branding and marketing efforts. 

We are focussing on branding our vehicle fleet and source drivers through organic means. At the same time we are introducing variable pricing where in we would pay drivers basis trips. Our technology is committed to introducing new technologies to identify demand and map available drivers to ensure they get more number of trips.

Hence they would stick to our platform.

We are also identifying partnerships with various companies that provide basic facilities like vehicle insurance, smart phones, insurance, short term loans for drivers so that drivers are not bothered about additional responsibilities and can focus on work.

We are a team of 248 Full Time Employees and 10 interns. We have around 30,000 driver partners registered on our platform.

We are a team of Logisticians and technologists.

Our Founder and CEO, Mithun Srivasta is an all-round logistician and has worked across Maersk, Google and BT.

Nikhil Suresh, is Director of Operations. He has 10+ years logistics experience. He has previously worked at Maersk.

Santosh Desai is our Chief Technology Officer. He has 12+ years of work experience across TCS and JDA.

Gautam Seshadri, our Chief Business Officer has 12+ years of experience in entrepreneurship and was a VC himself. Previously he was into Bond sales at UBS Warburg.

Preet Kunwar is our Head of Process and Analytics. He has 6+ years of analytical experience across Accenture and Goldman Sachs.

We have partnered with one of the largest intercity logistics company in South India, we plan to complement each other in intercity and intra-city roles to reach our customers across India.

We have also partnered with an organization to help drivers have close to zero cost EMI loans. We have tried to reduce this burden by providing immediate loan disbursement on same day of request from drivers.

Similarly we have partnered with other organizations to provide types, vehicle insurance, mobile phones, insurance for drivers.

Blowhorn is asset light, full stack intra city logistics service provider. We operate as a marketplace where on the supply side we have fleet of drivers with four wheelers of various capacity. On the demand side we have customer base whom we provide same day guaranteed delivery services. We also leverage the concept of micro-warehouses that enable us to complete a delivery in as low as 4-6 hours.

We are working with a broader objective of providing Amazon prime like capability to the SMEs who with time will choose to go online due to change in customer preferences. For this, we have a fully developed orchestration layer that is built on the concept of micro architecture. Each piece of technology is independent and can be integrated within a few days to start a similar kind of service. We had sensed this trend of change in market preferences, which is very evident in post Corona era, we aim to be ahead of the curve and expand very quickly to tier-2 and tier-3 cities, so that SMEs can leverage our service and offer same day delivery and expand their business. 

We are currently operating a revenue generating model, where we generate our own revenues for day to day operations. We are looking for grants/funds to expand our journey throughout the country, which would otherwise be a bit slow through organic expansion plans.