Wiz Freight, a full-stack digital cross-border supply chain start-up, has raised a Series A funding of INR 275 Crore in a mix of equity and debt led by Tiger Global with participation from Axilor Ventures, Foundamental, Arali Ventures, Stride Ventures and Alteria Capital. The investment marks the largest Series A funding in Indian logistics. The company plans to accelerate its technology R&D and global expansion into Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Africa with the new investment.
Founded in August 2020 in Chennai by serial entrepreneurs Ramkumar Govindarajan and Ramkumar Ramachandran, Wiz helps exporters and importers in emerging markets book and manage their cross-border shipments on its tech platform with e-commerce-like convenience. Wiz’s AI-powered platform offers instant capacity discovery, dynamic pricing, optimised routing, door to door tracking and automated document workflows saving countless hours for shippers.
The $2 Trillion global shipping is highly fragmented with several intermediaries leading to cost inefficiencies, lack of transparency and suboptimal customer experience. Wiz is the only digital player in the emerging markets that work directly between the carriers and the shippers by adopting a full-stack execution model offering significant cost savings and operational reliability to enterprise customers.
Armed with a rapidly growing team of 350+ people across 15+ locations and a network of over 200+ carriers & vendors, the startup today successfully caters to 1500+ enterprises including the likes of Adani, Mahindra, Tata, Aditya Birla and ITC who ship thousands of tons of cargo over air & sea every month using the Wiz platform. The company’s state of the art tech-enabled command centre in Chennai monitors the live execution of 1000s of shipments every month ensuring on-time delivery and round the clock customer service.
The company is already running a profitable business and has been doubling its revenue quarter on quarter. It plans to open 2 new tech R&D centres in Bengaluru and Singapore where it will carry further development of its AI/ML, blockchain & IoT capabilities to offer intelligent and connected cross-border shipping to its customers. It is looking to double its headcount and grow revenue by 400% in the coming year. The startup looks to launch operations in 15 other countries in Southeast Asia and Middle East & Africa with Singapore and Dubai as the HQs for the respective regions by the end of 2022.
Speaking on the fund raise, Ramkumar Govindarajan, CEO, Wiz Freight said, “Global trade is witnessing all-time high volatility in capacity & rates led by pandemic and the recent geopolitical events causing massive disruptions in supply chain planning & execution for shippers. We’re helping customers take control of their supply chains by offering 10x shipment visibility, intelligent risk-optimised routing solutions and multi-carrier capacity offerings through our tech platform and build maximum resilience to avoid business disruptions. We’re deeply committed to building disruptive shipping solutions for businesses in emerging markets and the tail-winds around post-pandemic tech adoption are helping the company reach its mission faster.” “We’re excited about partnering with the team at Wiz as they build a leading digital cross-border transporter in emerging markets” said Griffin Schroeder, Partner, Tiger Global.
