Shadowfax, India’s largest express delivery platform provides logistics support for intra city movement across multiple segments such as F&B, grocery, and e-tailing in 15 cities. Within a month’s launch of the marketplace logistics, Shadowfax is launching low cost express delivery in an additional 10 cities starting November 1, 2016. The latest expansion takes its total pin code coverage to more than 1500 adding cities like Ahmedabad, Indore, Faridabad, Kolkata, Chandigarh, Vadodra, Vishakhapatnam, Nagpur, and Lucknow. SMEs will now be able to make intra-city deliveries within a couple of hours.
“We have worked pretty hard in the last six months ensuring that we create sustainable unit economics in one of the most difficult segments of logistics. With +20% gross profit in our operations we believe that the time is ripe for us to expand aggressively and grow faster than ever. The backbone of this expansion will be the large enterprise clients such as Bigbasket, McDonalds, Amazon, Paytm and Myntra, with whom we have a deep relationship. This will be supplemented by the SME channel we have enabled.” says the Chief of Operations, Praharsh Chandra who was previously a consultant with AT Kearney and is an alumnus of IIT Delhi.
One of the pillars for the success of Shadowfax has been in driving the unit economics up. It has successfully created an end to end tech platform that has automated the complete life cycle of a rider’s association with the company with the key ones being: hiring, onboarding, payouts and satisfaction surveys. The technology platform runs on proprietary algorithms, one of which also enables intelligent routing systems and hence have been helpful in increasing efficiency.
“The algorithms have improved the efficiency by almost 100% as compared to the market standards. Currently, we are hitting an efficiency of 2.5 orders per hour on PAN India level. One of the unique drivers of this efficiency is the multi-category integration of grocery, food and e-commerce delivery on a single integrated platform”, says Vaibhav Khandelwal, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Shadowfax.
Shadowfax stands out as a unique product that allows different channels of demand to use a common pool of resources.
One of the key enablers of Shadowfax’s growth will be its strong rider hiring network. With a vision to become India’s largest platform of self-enabled professionals, the Shadowfax Rider App is getting 1000+ referrals on a daily basis across all cities of its operations.
“We have been working on developing a community based hiring platform which largely depends on referrals. We have successfully linked our platform with the Central Aadhar system to make the data verification a seamless process and become the trusted partner of all stakeholders”, says Abhishek Bansal who co-founded Shadowfax in April 2015.
Shadowfax is currently delivering more than 30,000 products on a daily basis. With the new expansion plan in place, Shadowfax is looking to grow 3x in the next 12 months. Shadowfax has raised $10 Mn till date from Fidelity Investments who have previously backed Uber, Snapchat and Alibaba. Shadowfax also counts investments from noted Angels — Kunal Bahl, Rohit Bansal and Zishaan Hayath in the list.
