Around 2012, when Indian e-commerce market started moving headlines, Vikas Sethia, then an AVP at KPMG, assured an opportunity to address the challenges in last-mile logistics and give that e-commerce musicians is currently facing. He quit his job, and saw industrial hubs, warehouses and mandis to understand last-mile logistical challenges across the board.” That’s when I realised that the problem was much larger and beyond the e-commerce segment. Supply chain in the last mile was almost a universal problem in the B2B2C scenario .”

Addressing supply chain challenges

Deciding to focus on the B2B distribution first, Vikas began working on a answer for the consumer goods sphere in April 2014. While Vikas knew that his experience in consulting would help a organized solution to address the lack of organisation in last-mile logistics, he needed help on the technology front. He was introduced to Anirudh Batwara, a young engineer from Manipal University, who was running his own startup incubated at the University.” Even though he was fresh out of college, Anirudh was speedy to understand the vision and its potential and came onboard ,” says Vikas.

Today, Vikas and Anirudh are co-founders of what is today known as DOST – a collaborative freight mobility mixture for metropolitan furnish bonds. An acronym for Delivery Optimization Shared Transportation, DOST offers a supply-chain-specific T2T( Tech to Truck) programme primarily for B2B deals focused on optimising last-mile distribution of goods and services. DOST consolidates transportation demand for distribution of goods and services and offers Delivery Infrastructure as a Service( DIaaS ). DOST has developed a fragrance of shared transportation mixtures like DOST eDhan( for gasoline/ diesel at doorstep ), DOST Marudhara( for mineral transportation from quarries to sites/ flowers ), last-mile load pooling answer DOST Sugam for wholesale marketplaces/ malls, and DOST Micro – a Mobile app-based just-in-time transportation solution. The stage is today being used by over 300 B2B players.

Startup journey 1.0

Interestingly, in the early years of the startup, before pivoting to DOST, the startup was known for its urban transmission aggregator solution, worded UDAN( Urban Delivery Van/ Auto Network ).

” In early 2014, we were providing tech-based regional goods transportation services in the local sell in Jaipur to distributors and retailers and soon introduced the concept of UDAN to aggregate big transporters under one brand and solve the last-mile logistical challenges ,” explains Vikas.

In addition to enabling small transporters to get business through the motorist app, UDAN also acted as a gateway to get information on motor vehicle ordinances, financial support like loans, support for returns filing and social status upliftment as a part of the network. Customs were also use UDAN to consolidate their errands and mail through one vehicle wherever possible reducing their costs. By 2015, the startup had expanded its own operations to Hyderabad, Bengaluru and Ahmedabad to test the model and its applicability to addressing the challenges of businesses in metroes and Tier 1 municipals. The time ascertained them working with Amazon, Apollo Pharmacy, Metro Cash& Carry, Aramex and hundreds of SME endeavours. After a round of angel investments, seed funding from Aramex followed.

While things examined good, two major events made a huge impact on UDAN alongwith the rest of the Indian logistics sphere – the demonetisation of 2016 and the GST rollout of 2017.” While the regulatory modifies is directed at imparting a positive change from a long-term perspective, the immediate affect was that the sector choked. Because, as a startup, we did not have banking credit facilities to support working capital funding, we had to scale down our operations vastly instead of scaling up ,” shares Vikas.

A turning point

They say, when you hit rock bottom, you can only go up. That sort of happened in real life for UDAN. That first came in the form of their agreement into the JioGenNext accelerator programme.

When we recruited JioGenNext, we were not sure of the scalability of our business simulation amidst an doubtful business environment ,” Adding to the challenges was the uncertainty in investments. He adds,” We were urgently looking for ways to de-risk our business pose and make it scalable without having a ceaseless dependency on capital .”

The interactions and brainstorming seminars at JioGenNext were instrumental in seeding the relevant recommendations for a pivot.

” The periods helped to understand the problem clearly and create alternative strategies towards scalability. One of the most wonderful suggestions we received was considering outsourcing of operations to a third-party partner to have more are concentrated on innovation and technological sciences ,” shares Vikas.

This helped the startup redesign its business model and started pivot from the aggregator simulate of UDAN to a managed marketplace simulate of DOST.

Parallely, the startup began looking for partners to outsource the operations of DOST, as suggested by JioGenNext. The pursuing led to Udai Parnami. Then 30 years old, Udai was overseeing his family business of equipping warehousing and 3PL service is brands like Dabur, Castrol, Asian Coats, Tata, Amul, etc across North India. He wanted to transform his traditional business through technological innovation and add new verticals and had started using the DOST platform for his existing business.

A swivel that opened new opportunities

With the pivot, the startup likewise got the opportunity to work with Reliance’s petroleum team to develop the DOST eDhan mixture – a mixture for direct transmission of diesel from fuel station to doorstep in a safe and transparent way through an e-commerce platform integrated with automated logistics.

” Here, we were working alongside approximately 12 -1 5 vertical headings/ elderly professionals from petroleum, IT, Jio and e-commerce units. This provided us deep penetrations into the sector, technology requirements and stakeholder’s needs. We congregated Mr. Neeraj Ambani, Group President – Supply Chain at Reliance Industries. He a service provider’s perspective and supplemented environmental and futuristic vision to DOST eDhan answer. This included suggestions to add a overturn logistic solution to DOST eDhan to bring back squandered hazardous oil for recycling and safe disposal .”

During this time, Udai, who was now well versed with the efficiency of DOST, lengthened his offer to work alongside the co-founders to develop the DOST eDhan mixture as its franchise partner.

” We put together to develop DOST eDhan solution and started stipulating end-to-end service to Reliance Jio in Rajasthan – from the technology platform to move busines. His on-ground operational expertise was instrumental in helping us streamline the operations in Rajasthan abruptly ,” shares Vikas.

And, that in turn identified DOST expanding its own operations with Reliance to start activities in other States like Haryana, Delhi and Uttar Pradesh.

By March 2018, it was clear that Udai had played an instrumental role in stabilising the business and conducting the expansion of DOST eDhan for Reliance Jio in all the regions of the four positions.” The give volume travelled up from 40,000 to roughly 2.5 million litres a few months .” Udai then came on board by investing in the startup and became an angel investor. Today, Udai has taken up a larger role of producing the operational rollout across India as Director of Operations.

When the startup embarked on the passage for DOST eDhan, it was a new business segment, but soon DOST realised the larger opportunity and the first-mover advantage that the government has, today, it has become the startup’s core business proposition.

Post the graduation from the JioGenNext accelerator programme, Vikas and the team stayed in touch with the leadership units of Petroleum, IT and JIO for product feedback and further education.

” We regularly interact with the JioGenNext team. In addition to the advice and suggestions from the leadership, we receive many references related to potential market opportunities or collaborations for DOST. We are too given opportunities to work with new startups opening JioGenNext based on our business synergies. We have recently collaborated with eShipz another JioGenNext startup of 2020 cohort for cross-marketing in logistics room .” Startup journey 2.0 that visualized an accelerated growth

Today, virtually 2.5 years after graduating from JioGenNext, DOST has a presence across 70 quarters – almost every city, township – of four of the largest states in north India – Rajasthan, Haryana, Delhi NCR and Uttar Pradesh. The ethic of the diesel to be provided by the platform was about Rs 150 crore in 2019 -2 0 with the annual run pace already touching Rs 200 crore. The startup says they are rewarding at the current scale of operations.

” Incidentally, where reference is penetrated JioGenNext, we were a 2.5 year-old startup and had a presence in just four metropolitans. The accelerator program truly helped us accelerate growth. In the last 24 months, we have grown 8x in terms of our geographical existence and 10 x in terms of gross market value of cargo being handled through the rationing logistics platform. We are also busines commanders in niche horizontals such as petroleum and mining ,” shares Vikas

Reflecting on how the accelerator was instrumental in helping the startup recognise its core backbone and characterize its future roadmap, Vikas says,” It was at JioGenNext that we picked our direction and started re-thinking our business representation pattern. We decided to become a technology-based intermediary .” Today, its right pattern has ascertained that their partners are doing the heavy lifting of operations enabling DOST to focus on innovation and technology to solve market challenges and drive growth.

DOST continues to remain focused on solving the challenges in the last mile of supply chain, the proposition on which they began our journey in 2014.

” What has changed is the business and functional representation. This has helped us scale much faster but with much less spend in investment capital or procedures. We are too focused on addressing the last-mile logistical challenges in niche stocks where the record obstacle is very high due to regulatory and safety standards. We are already the world-wide number one in terms of volumes handled through a single digital programme for diesel doorstep transmission ,” interprets Udai.

Given its stronghold, deep knowledge of supply chain, advanced but easy-to-use technology platform DOST is all set to expand its market footprint in India and world market.” We will attain the most of our first-mover advantage and fortes to drive the next phase of swelling and busines disruption.

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