FarEye, an India-based startup that helps e-commerce companies run their logistics more efficiently, had landed $3.5 million in funding from SAIF Partners.
The New Delhi company operates a software platform that essentially sits between e-commerce firms and their logistics and fulfillment partners. That’s the high-level premise, but FarEye does a lot more than that, so co-founder and CEOÂ Kushal Nahata told TechCrunch in an interview.
“Global logistics is changing now, e-commerce has disrupted the industry and changed things [while] mobile penetration increasing means expectations of consumers have shifted,” Nahata, who started FarEye with Gautam Kumar (COO) and Gaurav Srivastava (CTO) in January 2013, said.
FarEye, which Nahata said has been “profitable since day one,” can help its logistics and commerce customers with warehousing, first mile pickups, on-demand and hyperlocal logistics, last-mile and more. In additional to managing and optimizing delivery fleets — it claims its customers increase their first-time deliver efforts by 22 percent and save 2.3 man hours per staffer per day — FarEye includes analytics that can predict the best locations for a hub, optimal transportation types, and forward-looking business and logistics forecasts.
“We have closely observed the logistics processes, and incorporated features for demand forecasting and capacity planning. Both of them play a major role in planning the workforce and the day to day operations. With end-to-end mobility solution we are helping logistics players streamline the operations and reduce the cash-burn,” Nahata added.
The company makes money by charging a license fee, transaction fees and additionally for vertical-specific services. It claims to serve over 75 customers, including notable names like Ecom express, Gojavas, Holisol, Hitachi, aCommerce, Sephora, and Lazada.
While the company is based in India, with the majority of its 30 staff in Delhi, one-third of its revenue comes from overseas, primarily Southeast Asia, where e-commerce is showing signs of taking off in a major way, and the Middle East. With expansion in mind, FarEye is opening business development offices in Bangalore, Bombay and Singapore as it aims to increase its sales and marketing to land new customers in more varied verticals. It also plans to double its headcount.
The company is also looking to embrace the Internet Of Things and drones to enable automated delivery in India.
Nahata stressed that the company has raised money in order to scale and not because it is running out of capital.
“We have to be a profitable startup,” he said. “I don’t want to build something that goes away in two to three years. We want to exist for 10 or 20 years and be global.”