Karan Shaha and Vikas Chandrawat co-founded Vahak with an intent to digitise the Indian logistics industry, which now accounts for approximately 14 per cent of the country’s GDP. This logistics tech company is fostering India’s largest ecosystem of transport MSMEs, shippers, lorry and fleet owners on its website and app, amid the rapidly growing $250 billion Indian logistics sector.
Vahak, with its artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) backed mobile app acts as a community-driven open marketplace for load and lorry booking pan India. Through its load-lorry matchmaking feature, Vahak has improved profitability for truckers with increased runs with less dependency on personal networks, larger geographical reach and easy return load booking. Vahak has also created a one-stop shop by bringing financial services like vehicle insurance, safe and secure payments and trucking related value-added services (VAS) to the platform.
In addition to the company’s core AI and ML enabled marketplace, Vahak is coming up with premium services for manufacturers, shippers/load owners and OEMs requiring bulk transport, and new VAS features like cargo insurance, in the next couple of months. These services on top of the existing features of vehicle insurance, GPS, brand and network building, will provide online accessibility and ease of doing business for both, the demand and supply side of the road logistics sector, which carries 80 per cent of the Indian freight traffic.
According to Karan Shaha, Co-founder and CEO, Vahak, the vision is to build a trusted transport community platform that looks out for transporters, fleet owners, and truckers’ growth and well-being. The trucking community is a major contributor to the Indian economy and Vahak has captured less than a per cent of the $250 billion market. Over the next 4-5 years, the company aims to capture 10-20 per cent of the market, in line with deeper internet penetration and growing technology adoption at the last mile.
With a total of $20.3 million funding till date, Vahak manages over half a million monthly active load bookings on its app. Detailing about the transactions on the platform, Shaha reveals that with the transport community directly impacted during the pandemic, the app witnessed 20x growth with physical transport networks moving online. Backed with intuitive UI/UX and translations in 7 languages, transaction volume on the recently launched Vahak Payments platform is showing 100 per cent quarter on quarter growth. The aim is to achieve $1million ARR by December 2023, backed with positive investments in road infra by the government, higher demand in tier 3 and tier 4 cities and faster adoption of internet at the rural last-mile.