Dunzo- The First Startup In India To Receive Direct Funding From Google

Dunzo is all about empowering people to change how things are moved. Dunzo is a hyperlocal delivery app that fetches and delivers anything and everything within a city. The platform lets you choose and connect to the nearest delivery service, which can partner in purchasing the items you want and deliver it to you.

Dunzo has raised a total of $78.6M in funding over 11 rounds. Their latest funding was raised on Oct 4, 2019 from a Series D round. The company is funded by a whopping 16 investors with 3L Capital and Google being the most prominent investors. In fact, Dunzo is the first startup in India to receive direct funding from Google.

Dunzo – Redefining Hyperlocal Delivery

With the busy world and faster working paces, people hardly get time to relax. Dunzo caters to such changing lifestyles and needs by delivering whatever you want, whenever you want, and wherever you want at the click of a button. Dunzo provides delivery services in Bengaluru, Delhi, Gurgaon, Pune, Chennai, and Hyderabad and also operates a Bike Taxi service in Gurgaon.

The start-up delivers products from stores based on the customers’ needs ranging from couriers, food, groceries, pet supplies, fruits and vegetables, gifts, medicines, etc.

The company maintained a very good profile by ensuring the quickest possible service to the purchaser ranking high in customer satisfaction. The start-up became instantly famous when Google decided to fund it. Google invested a massive $12.3 million US dollars.

How Did It Start?

Initially, the interface was using WhatsApp as a medium of communication between the customer and the people who assigned tasks. Later on, a genuine working app was set up to accommodate all the needs of customers. There are no minimum order values for the ordered items. Dunzo doesn’t restrict the items available at its service and provides diverse services as per requirements.

The founders Ankur Agarwal, Mukundh Jha, Kabeer Biswas, and Dalvir Suri aim at reducing the chafing, cost, and time in doing a task as well as reaching distances than any other popular online service doesn’t provide service to. To enhance automatic and faster transactions to a customer, Dunzo has various product tie-ups. This lets customers choose whatever they want in customized menus available.

During the initial days, Co-founder and CEO Kabeer Biswas would run tasks himself.

“Running tasks like picking laundry and doing pickups and drops for over a year helped me really understand the time it takes. I also realized the process could be optimized with technology,” Kabeer says.

Mukund Jha, Co-founder, and CTO says:

“In 2015, most of our tasks required a human to monitor and run them. Now over 80 percent of our tasks run without any human intervention,”

“Today, we run a bunch of machine learning and rule-based algorithms that check which tasks are stuck or at an error state. If you have filled up your pickup and drop address, the information is automatically assigned to a task. If a partner, for some reason gets stuck at a location, the algorithms send a notification, only then does a human intervention take place.” he adds

The Road Map

2019 has been a rough year for the startup as far as revenue generation is concerned. The startup reported total revenue of Rs 3.5 crore (US$500K approx.) in FY19. Out of the total revenue, Rs 76 lakh (US$100K approx.) was “revenue from operation,” and the remaining Rs 2.7 crore (US$400K approx.) was from “other income.” Loses increased by 670 percent to a whopping 169 crores (US$28M approx.)

However, with the backing of Google and other prominent investors, Dunzo would definitely make a comeback. Keep an eye on this innovative startup in 2020.

Get in touch with the team today.

Image Source- Google