Rider is on a mission to provide online shoppers in Pakistan with next-day delivery “just like Amazon”. The Karachi-based company announced it has raised $3.1 million in new funding from Y Combinatior, along with new investors i2i, Flexport, Soma Capital and Rebel Fund. Returning investors include GFC, Fatima Gobi, and TPL E-Ventures, along with Dropbox co-founder Arash Ferdowsi. This brings RIder’s total raised to $5.4 million as of September 2021.
Founded in 2019 by former UPS Pakistan executive Salman Allana, Rider is building a network of sorting centers, delivery hubs, and digitized fleets of vehicles. The platform allows sellers to offer next-day delivery with route optimization, live tracking, and buyer scheduling. The company claims that since the pre-seed round in September 2021, monthly revenue has increased by 110% and it has doubled its customer base to 650 online sellers. To date, Rider has delivered 3 million parcels across 60 cities in Pakistan. It currently operates a network of 16 hubs covering 60 cities across Pakistan, which Allana says accounts for about 60% of e-commerce demand in the country.
Allana told TechCrunch that growing up in Karachi and spending his early career in sub-Saharan Africa meant he was used to poor logistics and supply chains. “If you order something online, you take a huge risk that it may never show up,” he said. When he moved to London for an MBA, he became obsessed with Amazon deliveries. “How does an order I place in the middle of the night end up at my door the next morning? I believe there is a big and clear opportunity to bring this quality of service to online sellers in Pakistan and eliminate the ‘parcel worry’ for all online buyers in Pakistan — including both me. “
After earning her MBA, Allana started working for UPS Pakistan as head of strategy and business development. He has seen for himself the challenges faced by logistics incumbents, including lost orders, buyers unwilling to order online again, and for online sellers. headaches, such as manual deliveries, slow adjustments and paybacks, create working capital challenges, especially for Pakistan’s 1 million SME businesses that rely on Instagram and Facebook for their marketing. close to the buyer.
“I’ve learned that traditional pay-outs are not set up or equipped to cater to the online retail trend, and that change from within will be slow and costly,” says Allana. . “The COVID pandemic has seen a major and irreversible change to online shopping across Pakistan. Only a purpose-built, dynamic, growth-focused startup could seize this opportunity at the right time. ”
Logistics is a notorious cash-burner. Allana says that the network of delivery hubs Rider is building is nothing like what you would normally imagine. Instead, they include mobile warehouses (or pre-sorted trucks), empty spaces in shopping mall parking lots, and gas stations. In the future, Rider also wants to have delivery centers at kirana or convenience stores. This means that delivery hubs are flexible enough to move as high-volume e-commerce zones change.
“We are basically building for ‘urban logistics,’ so we don’t have a requirement for large sorting centers and spaces,” he said. “Our network consists of many small delivery hubs intentionally placed to cover high volume e-commerce zones, and ultimately, these hubs can flexibly move as these zones change. change”.
Rider’s new funding will be used on its in-house technology, including e-commerce enablers such as plug-ins and integrated wallets to help SMEs, which Allana said most All are women-owned, growing their businesses.
“Our ambition was from day one — we wanted to be the number one end-to-end e-commerce logistics solutions provider in the country,” says Allana. “But we see logistics as a chain of building blocks, each of which we need to get right, operationally and financially, before we can build the next. Today, Rider is making last-mile deliveries to customers’ homes. We’ve proven our last mile solutions work, we’ve proven them to work at scale, and now we need to prove they’re sustainable before we step in. other verticals”. He added Rider has his eye on the next phase and tested the B2B movement, or land trucking, in January.
In a prepared statement, Kalsoom Lakhani, general partner of i2i said: “As the e-commerce industry in Pakistan grows, so does the need for a next generation of 3PLs that understand the Pakistani market realities and know how to build both powerful but also effective. We believe this player is Rider and have a lot of faith in Salman and his vision.
