BRINGING TRANSPARENCY TO CARGO- MOVING
THE MUMBAI- BASED COMPANY’S ENTERPRISE SOFTWARE IS HELPING BUSINESSES REDUCE INTERNATIONAL FREIGHT COSTS.
1) The Founders Chitransh Sahai, Gautam Prem Jain, Ayush Lodhi and Mehul Katiyar.
2) The Trigger
Prior to starting GoComet, the co-founders were working part-time, procuring goods at wholesale prices from Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba and selling them on Amazon.com in the US. However, the constant pain point was not buying or selling but the logistics part of the business. As freight forwarders (vendors who partner with logistics companies and organise shipments on behalf of shippers) still operate via phone calls and e-mail and their pricing mechanism – quotations and billing – are somewhat opaque, traders and manufacturers find it difficult to get the best deal. An internal study also revealed that logistics teams often spend 95 per cent of their working hours in generating bills and getting approvals instead of focussing on growth and strategy. As a result, the foursome decided to start Hyperflux Solutions to dive deep into the $40 billion global logistics market and help companies optimise their shipment processes.
3) The Backers
The start-up has raised an undisclosed amount in seed funding, led by India Quotient. Several angel investors, including Alok Mittal, Rajul Garg, Rajesh Yabaji, Chanakya Hridaya and Ramasubramaniam B among others, also invested in their personal capacity.
4) How It Works
The start-up’s first product is GoComet, a SaaS solution that brings together freight forwarders and companies on a centralised platform for all interactions and transactions, be it container booking, cargo tracking or customs clearance. From a single dashboard, companies can raise queries and get quotations from any of the 1,100 registered freight forwarders. Using data science, GoComet ranks the quotations received by a company so that it can easily select the best service provider. Freight forwarders can also alter their quotations to move up the ranking. The founders claim that the system helps save 8-15 per cent on annual freight costs incurred by companies. Customers are charged based on the number of transactions.