SUMMARY
SAIF Partners and Spring Canter Investment Ltd are investing in the round
The company will use the funds for capital expenditure
Rivigo aims to be EBITDA positive in FY20
After having closed Series E funding in July this year with $65 Mn, Gurugram-based logistics startup Rivigo has already started scouting for its next round.
According to the Ministry of Corporate Affairs accessed by Inc42, Rivigo’s board on December 9 approved the issue of 5086 Series F preference shares to SAIF Partners and Spring Canter Investment Ltd.
The details showed that the company is issuing each Series F shares at a nominal value of INR 10 with a premium of INR 279143 per share. This brings the issue size to INR 141.97 Cr ($20 Mn). The development was first alerted by paper.vc.
Rivigo has said in filings that it plans to use the funding “towards capital expenditure and working capital requirements of the business in accordance with the business plan adopted and approved by the board.”
Founded in 2014 by Gazal Kalra and Deepak Garg, Rivigo offers pan-India delivery services to ecommerce, pharmaceutical, automobile, cold-chain and fast-moving consumer goods companies. The company said it covers more than 29K pin codes in India.
This year the company had been trying to manage costs and turn its asset-heavy business to asset-light. In August 2019, the company has shifted its focus towards Relay-as-a-Service model. RaaS will be offered to fleet owners using its technology, pilots and a countrywide network of relay pit-stops.
Relay Trucking is an operating model where drivers change over after every few hundred kilometers of driving through a network of relay pit-stops and then they get to come back to their home base to return to their families every single day. Besides giving fleet owners access to pilots, a higher truck utilisation, it will also make its patented fuel solution, maintenance and cashless payment solutions available to fleet owners in the country.
Relay-as-a-Service (RaaS) makes relay asset-light while solving life’s challenges of millions of pilots. And this fits the bill perfectly for Rivigo’s investors. In July, reports surfaced that Rivigo had laid off nearly 70-100 employees over the last few months.
At the time, Gazal Kalra, cofounder of Rivigo, attributed the recent attrition to “performance and market dynamics.” However, reports claimed that investors have been pressuring Rivigo to cut costs, move away from an asset-heavy business, and improve its unit economics across all business verticals.
These people have also indicated that Rivigo has focused on significantly restructuring its business, and evolving a viable model, over the last one year. Hence, in FY19, the company said that it has added INR 300 Cr to its revenue with a loss of INR 600 Cr.
The company is now looking to be EBITDA profitable in March 2020. It competes with the likes of Blackbuck, Locus, Locanix, ElasticRun, and 4tigo Network Logistics.
