Instavans raises funding from Dell's Suresh Vaswani

Instavans Logistics Pvt Ltd, an on-demand aggregator for small trucks, has raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Suresh Vaswani, president at Dell Services.

The development was first reported by The Economic Times, citing Vaswani. As part of the transaction, Vaswani will join the company's board.

The Bangalore-based company didn't respond to queries from Techcircle.in by the time of filing this article.

Founded in November 2014 by Vinay Goel and Sanjay Shah, Instavans connects shippers and truckers within a city through its web and mobile platforms.

According to The Economic Times report, Instavans estimates the market for intra-city trucking industry in India at $15 billion.

Instavans recently secured Rs 11 crore ($2 million) in pre-Series A funding from investors including Naveen Munjal, managing director of Hero Eco Group; GBS Raju, chairman-energy at GMR group; and Manav Garg, founder and CEO of Eka Software.

India's transport industry is highly fragmented with no dominant players in the segment. Trucks transport around 2 billion tonnes of freight across the country every year. This is the market that Instavans hopes to tap into.

A bunch of tech startups have joined the business of connecting last-mile logistics services providers for intra-city transport in the recent past. These asset-light ventures do not own the vehicles themselves and come across as a booking platform similar to taxi hailing apps Ola and Uber. Several have also raised angel or venture capital funding.

Earlier this month, auto maker Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd entered the intra-city logistics segment with Smart Shift, a digital platform that connects cargo owners and transporters. Also in October, Mumbai-based mini-truck booking platform Quifers raised $300,000 from the Indian Angel Network and Smile Group.

In August, Pickingo, a B2B on-demand hyperlocal logistics startup, raised $1.3 million from Rehan Yar Khan of Orios Venture Partners along with Zishaan Hayath.

Moovo.in, an on-demand booking platform for mini-trucks, raised an undisclosed amount in seed funding from cricketer Yuvraj Singh's venture investment fund YouWeCan and others in July. The same month, Bangalore-based theKarrier raised Rs 1.5 crore ($240,000) in a seed funding round led by Sol Primero.

Also, Turant Delivery, an on-demand logistics aggregator for relocation services, acquired smaller peer Zippon for an undisclosed amount last month.

On the other hand, taxi aggregator Ola recently extended its services to autos and mini buses.

The truck aggregation segment has also caught the attention of global lodestars of the entrepreneurial world. On Tuesday, Business Insider reported that Convoy, a six-month-old US-based online on-demand truck aggregator, raised $2.5 million in seed funding from investors including Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Marc Benioff of Salesforce, Drew Houston of Dropbox, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and ex-Starbucks president Howard Behar.