Geoinformatics SaaS Platform Locale.ai Backed By Chiratae Ventures, Others

Map based analytics software provider Locale.ai has raised $ 1.3 Mn funding in its seed round from Chiratae Ventures and Better Capital. The round also saw participation from angels such as former Uber CPO Manik Gupta, Go-Jek SVP of Engineering Sidu Ponnapa, former Clevertap SVP of enterprise sales Kuldeep Dhankar, Whatfix CEO Khadim Batti, Chargebee CEO Krish Subramanian, Bounce CEO Vivekananda HR, Stripe product manager Kaushik Subramanian, and former Paytm Money CEO Praveen Jadhav.

Founded in March 2019 by Aditi Sinha and Rishabh Jain, Locale.ai provides map based analytics and decision making software to measure fleet performance, user behavior and business health on ground.

Their product ingests data across 3 verticals: user (demand), fleet (supply), order. They have built modules and analyses that help companies find problematic or growth areas and take action on them. In those areas, depending on the industry or business model, companies can use demand and supply behaviour to plan capacity, bridge supply – demand gaps or change pricing or service level agreements (SLAs).

“We took inspiration from Uber and Amazon who became billion dollar businesses by making location and demand-supply related decisions at its core. Locale’s aim is to help every company with moving users (demand) / fleet (supply) provide the same level of tools and infrastructure and attain operational excellence,” says Aditi Sinha, cofounder, Locale.ai.

Locale currently works with companies in 9 countries such as Europe, Latin America, MENA, India, Singapore and some of its notable clients include Bounce (India), Dunzo (India), Zwings (UK), OMNi (Costa Rica) and has successfully partnered with Wunder Mobility (Germany) as well.  The startup claims to impact Omni’s topline by helping them improve their order volumes and helped Zwings workforce to be 50% more productive by helping them swap batteries efficiently.

 “We started with hyperlocal delivery and mobility companies but are now expanding into logistics and e-commerce companies as well,” says Aditi. 

Next phase of the journey would involve scaling Locale across other industries and new markets such as third party logistics and ecommerce companies and extending more functionalities on the product.

Bengaluru-based Locus and Mumbai-based LogiNext are among the startups that are working to improve location intelligence for businesses that need logistics solutions or geoinformation data. 

Both these rivals for Locale are also well-funded — Locus recently raised $50 Mn in Series C funding led by GIC, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, with participation from Qualcomm Ventures LLC and existing investors Tiger Global and Falcon Edge, and counts brands such as Nestle, Unilever and BigBasket among its customers. On the other hand, LogiNext has raised over $50 Mn with Airtel, Paytm and Samsung as its clients.

Other tech-enabled logistics startups include Shiprocket, Pidge, Shadowfax, Shipway and Shipsy, most of which have raised funding in the recent months.

The logistics market in India is forecasted to grow at a CAGR of 10.5% between 2019 and 2025. At present, the draft national logistics policy is under works and is expected to bring down India’s expenditure on logistics to 9% of GDP from the existing 14%.