Meet the new Bansal making waves in Indian ecommerce

Abhishek Bansal of Shadowfax is dreaming big.

Abhishek Bansal, 24, comes across as a guy next door.

Wearing a untucked black shirt, worn out black jeans, a pair of toe-covering sandals, and a rakhi (a band of brotherhood tied to the wrist by a sister during an Indian festival), it is easy to miss him in a crowd.

But he isn’t the guy next door.

His business-to-business (B2B) hyperlocal logistics startup Shadowfax recently raised US$8.5 million in series A funding, from Fidelity International’s investment arm Eight Roads Ventures. This happened less than a month after the Gurgaon-based company secured angel funding from Snapdeal co- founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal, Zishaan Hayath of Powai Lake Ventures, and Prashant Malik of Limeroad.

Abhishek had, along with his college mate Vaibhav Khandelwal, launched Shadowfax only in May this year. Talking to Tech in Asia over a cup of hot coffee at Starbucks in a Mumbai suburb, Bansal spoke about how he is living his “life on the edge,” as an entrepreneur.

Bansals of the Bania community

The surname Bansal, which belongs to the Bania trading community in India, suggests that his entrepreneurial streak is not serendipity in action. Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal of Flipkart, Rohit Bansal of Snapdeal, Mukesh Bansal who founded Myntra – all of them belong to this traditional trading sect of the country.

Shadowfax, named after the The Lord of the Rings’s horse who can interpret human language, is looking at “uberization of delivery boys,” according to Abhishek. Its value proposition is to cut costs of merchants on the logistics front. ‘We tell our clients “you don’t have to hire delivery persons for your company.’ We can provide them that,” says Abhishek.

Many are trying to provide this service, but few succeed in scaling up fast.

Earlier this month, Shadowfax acquired the entire team of Pickingo, a smaller rival which was operating in the same sector but had to close down. “We were looking to hire senior people for our startup and this was a good fit as the founders of Pickingo are IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) alumni,” says Abhishek.

The attrition challenge

Shadowfax is in an industry where attrition is extremely high. “Every day we face problems. But that doesn’t mean that I will back off. I enjoy solving problems,” says Abhishek, who worked in his friend’s night delivery startup before venturing out on his own. And to the problem of attrition, he claims to have found a solution.

“Ours is an industry where the first month attrition is 22 percent. But at Shadowfax, it is less than 1 percent,” he says.

Trying to be different

Gearing up for a bigger play