A logical leap into logistics

Vaibhav Dabhade admits that his software startup screwed up badly when it launched in 2011. The system for managing online shopping orders that his small team created worked so poorly that its first corporate customer asked for a refund.

That system was quickly scrapped.

“We rebuilt our software again from scratch,” Dabhade tells Tech in Asia, while still focusing on the nuts-and-bolts side of Southeast Asia’s then-fledgling ecommerce market.

Fast forward eight years, and Dabhade’s first startup, Anchanto, has clearly survived its early reboot.

Vaibhav Dabhade / Photo credit: Anchanto

It now has 7,800 clients subscribed to its ecommerce marketplace software, SelluSeller, plus 270 businesses signed up to its warehouse management software, Wareo.

Anchanto has raised four rounds of funding totaling US$11.1 million – the most recent one was a series C in July 2018.

Although Dabhade’s startup has backing from institutional investors, it has also got backing from two of its major clients. With a chuckle, he describes those deals as “beyond a testimony.”

You can also call it the opposite of asking for a refund.

From India to Singapore

Dabhade, 41, was motivated to get into the logistics business after growing up around trucks in his native India, where his family runs a haulage business.

“It was always a point for me to do something which I saw my grandfather and my father doing in a very conventional way, without using any technology,” says the CEO, who moved to Singapore in 2003.

“But I was in Singapore, so I wanted to do something more relevant for Southeast Asia, something more relevant for new trends,” he adds.

So that meant using lots of tech. And he didn’t want to own trucks, like his family does, or warehouses – though he experimented with that in the early days of this startup. As a software engineer, he wanted to leap into the backend of the ecommerce market with digital tools.

“I was looking for something that’s there for the next 10, 20 years,” Dabhade says of the market opportunity he sought out. What he wanted was a tool that he “could sell to any business.”

Stacking up