India’s Uber for trucks TheKarrier bags $230K funding

India’s TheKarrier, an on-demand truck service provider, has bagged US$230,000 from early stage funds Sol Primero and Outbox Ventures.

The startup is an aggregator of trucks for intra city goods and transportation service. Like Uber, TheKarrier users book a vehicle on the app to hire its services within 45 minutes. Only instead of a car, they book a truck to carry goods weighing up to 800 kilograms. The app also allows live tracking of the vehicle.

The six-month-old startup is currently operational in Bangalore with 300 vehicles and plans to expand to five cities with fresh funding. It claims to serve 1,000 orders per month.

The logistics sector is highly fragmented in India with no large formal offline players dominating the market. “More than three quarters of the market are made up of individual truck owners who have about one to three trucks. They don’t have the bandwidth to market their services. So end users also have difficulty finding vehicles. Trucks need to be optimised, which will also bring down the cost of service,” says Aravind Sanka, founder of TheKarrier.

There have been over a dozen startups springing up all over the country to tap into the opportunity. Recently, taxi hailing app Ola entered the space with food delivery and is reportedly planning to start delivering groceries as well. Some of the other funded startups in the space include Unitus Seed Fund-backed Blowhorn and Kae Capital-backed Porter.