Trukker has created an 'Uber for trucks' in the Middle East

A lot of people have great ideas while they’re on holiday, lay by the side of a pool or chatting over a meal with friends. Most of us let the moment pass and then drift back into the daily routine, unwilling or unable to risk the security of a regular pay cheque.

But Gaurav Biswas didn’t. The founder of Trukker ”was having a good time” working at one of the world’s biggest building consultancy firms, Aecom, where he had been project director of the Yas Mall scheme, and had become one of the youngest directors at the firm at the age of 32.

“If I was at Aecom now I would probably be a VP or looking after a big geography,” he says.

Mr Biswas explains that an idea came when a friend, who had a fertiliser manufacturing business in India was being interrupted during a holiday dinner by an unreliable haulage company, which had agreed to transport nine container loads to a port, but could then no longer hold up its end of the bargain.

"I said, ‘there should be something like an Uber for trucks because there are so many of them lying empty on roadsides and you seem to be struggling’,” Mr Biswas says. “That thought stayed with me for a couple of days.”

He asked an old school friend, Pradeep Mallavarapu, who worked in IT, how difficult it would be to create the technology, and within two months Mr Biswas had quit his job and the pair were hiring an IT team in India to develop their technology, as well as drumming up interest among both drivers and end users in the UAE.

“We moved very fast,” Mr Biswas says.

The company

started

in 2016 by offering home moving services. Mr Biswas explains this was a way of ensuring drivers who used the app had loads to pick up before the company had the chance to build a base of corporate clients.

"Now, it is a very small part of our business less than 5 per cent,” he says. Trukker has since moved up the chain, offering jobs moving domestic cargo across the UAE, and later into long distance, crossborder cargo.

“Now, that is our biggest product more than 70 per of our revenue is from long-haul trucking across the GCC,” he said. It also opened a Cairo office earlier this month.

“The business is

quite huge. If you think of it as road freight, just road freight within the GCC is a $46bn (Dh169bn) market. We feel our market is going to be Turkey in the North, Iraq in the East, the whole of the GCC and then all the way along North Africa Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco."

If you add all of those areas up, the rucking market is worth almost $80bn-$90bn, he says.

The co-founders funded the business from their own resources for as long as possible. “Before I got the first investment from anyone I was down $400,000 of my own money," Mr Biswas says.

“I was lucky I had some money. I probably could have gone through another $300,000-$400,000 of my own money, but at the end of that I would have been like, ‘OK, man, let’s get back to the consulting life’.

“Someone recently asked me what my advice was to someone raising money and I said … if you have the money you must risk your own money first’. If you can’t risk your own money, why would you ask someone else to risk their money on you?”