SaaS startup Fleetx gets pre-Series A funding

Fleetx.io, an intelligent fleet management and predictive analytics platform, has raised an undisclosed amount in a pre-Series A round of funding led by venture capital firm India Quotient and dealmaking platform LetsVenture’s angel fund.

The Gurugram-based startup said in a statement that a number of individual investors had also participated in the round. 

These included Arun Tadanki, former managing director of Yahoo Southeast Asia & India; Ajay Prabhu, chief financial officer of Quest Global; Prashanth Susarla, former chief technology officer PayU Payments; Sajid Rahman, chief executive at Telenor Health; Aditya Pratap Singh, director at Bookmyforex.com; and Vibhu Garg, co-founder of Unicommerce.

Fleetx.io said that it plans to use the fresh capital to enhance its product and technology besides expanding to other cities across India.

Founded in 2017 by Vineet Sharma, Abhay Jeet Gupta, Udbhav Rai, Parveen Kataria and Vishal Misra, Fleetx caters to more than 200 clients. It uses artificial intelligence, big data and predictive analytics to help fleet owners boost their efficiency and safety.

"We believe that fleet management is not only about GPS tracking; there are other critical day-to-day operations which if not managed efficiently can impact the bottomline of any fleet and logistics business,” said co-founder Sharma, who is also the chief executive of the company.

Sharma was earlier part of the software development and engineering team at online travel search engine ixigo.com.

Fleetx had raised an angel round last year.

The company claims to have positive earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) while growing at 30% month-on-month. 

India Quotient is an early-stage venture capital firm. India Quotient marked the first close of its third fund last year at $30 million (Rs 195 crore), which is much bigger than the combined value of all its previous funds. 

Among its prominent portfolio firms is vernacular social networking platform ShareChat.

LetsVenture had last October announced the launch of an open-ended angel fund. The dealmaking platform had said its fund would enable early-stage investments worth Rs 1,000 crore (around $135 million) in the next two years. 

Since being founded in 2014, LetsVenture has facilitated deals worth about Rs 450 crore ($70 million) on its platform.

Deals in the space

Fleetx joins a number of early-stage software-as-a-service (SaaS) startups to have received funding lately.

Mumbai-based enterprise SaaS startup Bnext raised $300,000 (around Rs 2.2 crore) from an angel investor in October last year.

In July, US- and India-based SaaS and technology company TheCapitalNet, Inc. had raised $500,000 (Rs 3.4 crore then) in seed funding.

Other SaaS startups that received funding in 2018 include Trilyo, which provides artificial intelligence-based SaaS solutions for business-to-business e-commerce clients in the hospitality sector, and US- and India-based Paperflite.