India’s Locus raises $22 million to expand its logistics management business

Published May 13, 2019

Locus, an Indian startup that uses AI to help businesses map out their logistics, has raised $22 million in Series B funding to expand its operations in international markets.

The financing round for the four-year-old startup was led by Falcon Edge Capital and Tiger Global. Existing investors Exfinity Venture Partners and Blume Ventures also participated in the round. The startup has raised $29 million to date, Nishith Rastogi, co-founder and CEO of Locus, told TechCrunch in an interview.

Locus works with companies that operate in FMCG, logistics and e-commerce spaces. Some of its clients include Tata Group companies, Myntra, BigBasket, Lenskart and Bluedart. It helps these clients automate their logistics workload — tasks such as planning, organizing, transporting and tracking of inventories, and finding the best path to reach a destination — that have traditionally required intensive human labor.

“Say a Lenskart representative is visiting a house or an office to offer an eye checkup, and suddenly two more people there are interested in getting their eyes checked. The representative could attend these two new potential clients, or wrap things up with the first client and take care of his or her next appointment,” said Rastogi.

Locus looks at a client’s past data, identifies patterns and automates these kind of decisions on a large scale. In an example shared earlier with TechCrunch, Rastogi talked about how Locus had built a scanner for e-commerce companies for measuring products.

Rastogi said he will use the fresh capital to develop products and expand Locus in Southeast Asian and North American markets. The startup says half of its 110-person workforce is outside of India. Half of the IP it has built and the revenue it generates comes from its team outside of India.

He said the startup has spent the recent quarters studying these international markets, and has secured some anchor clients to expand the business. Locus is operationally profitable already and any additional capital goes into expanding its business, he added.

The logistics market in India has long been riddled with challenges. A growing number of startups, including BlackBuck — which raised $150 million last week — have emerged in recent years to tackle these problems.

The new funding also illustrates Tiger Global’s new strategy for the Indian market. The VC fund, which has invested in B2C businesses Flipkart and Ola in India, has made a number of investments in B2B startups in recent months. Last month, it invested $90 million in agritech supply chain startup Ninjacart, and weeks later, it gave cloud-based solutions provider Zenoti $50 million. It also participated in customer marketing service ClearTap’s $26 million round.

India’s Mfine raises $17.2M for its digital healthcare service

Published April 23, 2019

Mfine, an India-based startup aiming to broaden access to doctors and healthcare by using the internet, has pulled in a $17.2 million Series B funding round for growth.

The company is led by four co-founders from Myntra, the fashion commerce startup acquired by Flipkart in 2014. They include CEO Prasad Kompalli and Ashutosh Lawania who started the business in 2017 and were later joined by Ajit Narayanan and Arjun Choudhary, Myntra’s former CTO and head of growth, respectively.

The round is led by Japan’s SBI Investment with participation from sibling fund SBI Ven Capital and another Japanese investor, Beenext. Existing Mfine backers Stellaris Venture Partners and Prime Venture Partners also returned to follow-on. Mfine has now raised nearly $23 million to date.

“In India, at a macro-level, good doctors are far and few and distributed very unevenly,” Kompalli said in an interview with TechCrunch. “We asked ‘Can we build a platform that is a very large hospital on the cloud?,’ that’s the fundamental premise.”

There’s already plenty of money in Indian healthtech platforms — Practo, for one, has raised more than $180 million from investors like Tencent — but Mfine differentiates itself with a focus on partnerships with hospitals and clinics, while others have offered more daily health communities that include remote sessions with doctors and healthcare professionals who are recruited independently of their day job.

“We are entering a different phase of what is called healthtech… the problems that are going to be solved will be much deeper in nature,” Kompalli said in an interview with TechCrunch.

Mfine makes its money as a digital extension of its healthcare partners, essentially. That means it takes a cut of spending from consumers. The company claims to work with more than 500 doctors from 100 “top” hospitals, while there’s a big focus on tech. In particular, it says that an AI-powered “virtual doctor” can help in areas that include summarising diagnostic reports, narrowing down symptoms, providing care advice and helping with preventative care. There are also other services, including medicine delivery from partner pharmacies.

To date, Mfine said that its platform has helped with more than 100,000 consultations across 800 towns in India during the last 15 months. It claims it is seeing around 20,000 consultations per month. Beyond helping increase the utilization of GPs — Mfine claims it can boost their productivity 3 to 4X — the service can also help hospitals and centers increase their revenue, a precious commodity for many.

Going forward, Kompalli said the company is increasing its efforts with corporate companies, where it can help cover employee healthcare needs, and developing its insurance-style subscription service. Over the coming few years, that channel should account for around half of all revenue, he added.

A more immediate goal is to expand its offline work beyond Hyderabad and Bangalore, the two cities where it currently operates.

“This round is a real endorsement from global investors that the model is working,” he added.