Porter aims to achieve one lakh trips per day by 2020

Porter, an online logistics marketplace, aims to achieve approximately one lakh trips per day, with over 30,000 vehicles, by 2020.

Since its launch in 2014, Porter has over 25,000 regular clients and around 75,000 one-time users. It holds a record of four lakh deliveries till date. “We aim to achieve approximately 100k trips/day with 30,000-plus partnered vehicles by 2020,” Porter co-founder and CEO Pranav Goel told DH.

Porter is a pioneer in tech-enabled intra-city logistics. It is an online marketplace which offers mini-trucks (LCVs) to SMEs, small businesses and individuals on on-demand, as well as, on fixed arrangement basis. In fixed arrangement, vehicles are provided to industries for managing their first-mile, last-mile and inter-warehouse movement of goods.

On Porter’s booking platform, individuals and SMEs can connect to the nearest available vehicle depending on their requirement. The app offers the convenience of real-time tracking of vehicles, and also enables payments through the Porter wallet.

“So far, we have raised two rounds of funding amounting to $6 million from Sequoia, Kae Capital, and other angel investors,” Goel added.

On expansion plans, Goel said, “We are currently present in five cities namely Delhi, Bengaluru, Mumbai, Chennai and Hyderabad and plan to expand our presence in 15 major cities like Pune, Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Chandigarh, Jaipur, Lucknow and Coimbatore.”

On challenges, Goel said, “Our major challenge is to get more and more people associated with the platform. Both the supply and the demand side show resistance when it comes to trusting a new platform for their logistics needs. As drivers generally belong to the lower section of society and are not well read, it took us some time to explain to them the benefits of working in an organised system. We have designed a simple-to-use driver application with minimal inputs; most of the actionable buttons in the app are colour-coded and use symbols to help them easily understand.”

Goel explained, “Clients on the other hand have issues trusting their valuables with an unknown driver on a new platform. They prefer depending on their previous contacts for their major deliveries. Kickbacks are also a major source of friction in faster adaptability for our platform. We’ve addressed this by adopting a transparent and safe transit model which allows customers to track the vehicle movement in real time. Post completion of the trip, an invoice is generated which is delivered to the customer via SMS, as well as email, informing him that the package has been delivered safely. Additionally, government regulations like no-entry zones and infrastructural issues such as network problems have made us reassess and improve on technological fronts.”

On competition, Goel, claimed, “We are at least 10 times bigger in scale and strength to our closest competitor. Local vendors with more than two vehicles (which constitutes good share of LCVs in the market) is our direct competition.