HyperTrack, a last-mile logistics technology company, announced Wednesday the closing of a $25 million series A funding round and release of its BuilderX software. The funding round was led by WestBridge Capital and existing investor Nexus Venture Partners.
The Berkeley, California-based company offers technology that provides “post-dispatch ground truth” for businesses operating in the last-mile delivery space, especially those that use gig economy drivers.
Total funding in the 6-year-old company is now just north of $30 million, founder and CEO Kashyap Deorah, told Modern Shipper. The company is not disclosing a valuation at this time.
Custom business logic
The BuilderX technology includes software development kits (SDKs) and application programming interfaces to plan, assign and track orders for last-mile logistics with custom business logic and workflows.
“Logistics represents 12% of global GDP, yet the technology that enables it is stuck in the past,” said Sumir Chadha, co-founder and managing director of WestBridge Capital. “We are seeing a strong movement in the market to upgrade logistics tech solutions through in-house builds, and HyperTrack is the API of choice for these developers. The last-mile logistics market deserves its own cloud.”
According to HyperTrack, the rise of last-mile delivery and use of gig workers to meet on-demand logistics is causing a shift that requires the ability to automate last-mile fulfillment. HyperTrack offers order planning, assignment, location tracking and mapping infrastructure as simple APIs so developers can quickly build new logistics solutions in just days that meet unique business cases and workflows.
“Gig workers and the growing need for same-day delivery in the ‘here-and-now’ economy requires rethinking of the logistics stack,” said Deorah. “Our solution is transforming massive industries as disruptors continue to use our API platform to build logistics apps for the future. This funding will help fuel our mission in changing the way all industries deliver products and services.”
Growth mode
The new funding will be used to support additional growth and expand the engineering team.
The BuilderX solution includes:
- Planning and assigning orders for efficient operations that allow users to build custom business logic and workflows for on-time delivery with higher capacity utilization and predictable per-order cost. This eliminates bill shock for hyperscaler cloud and maps consumption due to opaque and piecemeal pricing of lower-level services.
- Tracking of orders for on-time fulfillment with the lowest cost. This includes live location tracking with driver and consumer apps and an operations dashboard for continuous real-time visibility.
- End-to-end order fulfillment lifecycle. Using intelligence built on the ground truth of the logistics operations, this includes addresses, service and route times.
Deorah said it has taken some time for the company to develop its software stack and “get it right. But when we did, the market responded and grew quickly.”
Unlike more traditional last-mile technologies, HyperTrack’s technology is designed with the gig workforce in mind.
“It’s Lego bricks for logistics,” Deorah said. “You have about a million developers in the world that are building last-mile logistics. If you look at how supply chain and logistics were done before, you would have pre-scheduled orders and you would sequence them, batch them, route optimize them. And you would do that the night before.”
As e-commerce and service fleets have grown, though, the on-demand nature of dispatching and uncertainty of gig worker availability on any given day has complicated the routing process.
“The workforce that is fulfilling this is becoming more gig work. They wake up in the morning and decide they are going to work,” Deorah said.
Agnostic approach
HyperTrack’s technology attempts to solve this problem by offering an API solution that is map-agnostic, allowing developers to “stitch up mobile cloud and technology” to build a custom solution for their business. It will pull together information from most software solutions.
Deorah noted last-mile delivery firms such as Bringg and Onfleet provide their own system. Google Last Mile Fleet is another market option, but it too is not identical to the HyperTrack approach, he said.
“Those solutions start to come closer to what HyperTrack does but even they fall short because … you have to pay for the underlying cloud and map [services],” Deorah said. “We have had competitive situations where companies have looked at Google Maps Last Mile Fleet and HyperTrack” and chosen HyperTrack because of its cost certainty.
“Once your costs explode, it’s very hard to deal with that,” he said. “Then you throw a team at it to optimize, but what you think is [something] that happens once becomes a fixture.”
HyperTrack is targeting developers with its solution. So a last-mile delivery company with a dozen vans is not likely to be a direct customer, but the firm that provides last-mile solutions for larger enterprises would be. These may include home delivery, grocery delivery or field service fleets.
Rapid expansion
HyperTrack said business has been expanding rapidly in Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Its customers include Germany-based marketplace MagaLoop, which provides streamlined order fulfillment for independent retailers across Europe. Spiritzone uses HyperTrack to support live tracking of liquor delivery orders in India. In the U.S., San Francisco-based Jobox.AI, which connects available technicians with consumers, is a customer.
About 65% of its revenue comes from North America, but it has a presence on every continent except Antarctica.
The company is able to connect to most systems, Deorah said, but it is likely to remain in the background, helping support the developers that will make last-mile delivery solutions function best.
“We don’t want the Best Actor prize; we want the Best Supporting Actor,” Deorah said. “We are just standing there helping them do their jobs better.”