Rajiv Sharma, a former CEO of Airtel Enterprise Business, has today launched his venture called dPronto, a last mile delivery (including hyper local logistics) company which has built its business model around e-commerce companies (including hyperlocal market places). Its mission is to provide last mile logistics services for e-commerce companies and full service logistics companies by leveraging trained fresh manpower supply, disruptive technology and efficient processes that minimize delivery turnaround times and optimize costs.
dPronto’s core value proposition is their single minded focus on last mile logistics, thereby enabling their customers to devote their attention to their core offerings. Full service logistics companies will also significantly benefit from partnering with dPronto when they need to expand to multiple smaller towns quickly and cost effectively in line with growth in e-commerce in such towns.
dPronto already counts front running e-commerce companies in India such as Flipkart, Snapdeal and ShopClues as customers. Last mile delivery is the most critical factor in the success of e-commerce companies as it directly impacts the customer experience and its criticality will only increase manifold as internet and e-commerce penetrate deeper in India and spread to smaller towns and cities. India’s Internet user base is expected to go up to 640 million by 2019 from 281 million internet users in 2014. A whole lot of these new Internet users will be from Tier 2 and 3 cities. The growth of the online retail market in India is a direct consequence of this rise in Internet users and is expected to touch $50 billion by 2020. The e-commerce logistics market in India is pegged to reach $5.1 billion by 2020 and last mile logistics which constitutes as much as 40% of e-commerce logistics is expected to reach $2.1 billion by 2020. This is the market where dPronto has almost fanatic focus on.
Outlining dPronto’s future plans, Rajiv Sharma, Managing Director and Co-Founder said, “As internet and e-commerce penetration deepens in India by spreading to smaller towns and cities, reliable, cost efficient and scalable last mile delivery services will set apart the successful e-commerce companies from the rest. Our vision is to help these e-commerce companies to succeed by vastly improving the last mile delivery experiences of their customers. We also provide cost efficient and scalable last mile solutions to full service delivery companies. We are accomplishing this by leveraging our group company Empower Pragati’s mobilising and training network spread across 600 towns of India and over 5 years’ experience in this domain. This network which will provide an uninterrupted supply of freshly trained and motivated logistics staff will no doubt be a key to our success when combined with our highly efficient back-end technology and a hands on Founders’ team with extensive operational experience."
dPronto, as the group company of Empower Pragati, a Social Enterprise and a leader in Livelihood Skill Training for the underprivileged, has the benefit of its domain expertise and training network to mobilize fresh delivery and warehouse staff from the underprivileged sections of society and equip them with the necessary skills relevant to the last mile delivery functions. Empower Pragati has skilled over 100,000 underprivileged people in India since its inception in 2010 with a target to train 2 million youth by 2020.
On the back-end, dPronto’s agile logistics application enables the company to facilitate seamless flow of data across all stakeholders, thus achieving industry leading SLAs.
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Rajiv Sharma[/caption]dPronto’s core management team cumulatively brings to the table 100+ years of strong operations experience, in itself a quite a rarity in the startup world, across sectors such as Telecom, IT, Cloud Computing, Retail, and Distribution. The core team comprise of Rajiv Sharma, Pritha Dutt, KB Rajendran and Sanjeev Sharma. Fuelled by their vast experience, the team has hit the ground running, implementing cost control measures and best practices such as Six Sigma to improve process efficiencies from day one itself. Rajiv who was earlier CEO of Airtel Enterprise Business serves as Managing Director and co-founder of dPronto.Pritha Dutt is a Director and co-founder and was President in Feedback Ventures earlier. KB Rajendran is a Director and co-founder and brings extensive experience across leading corporates such as Airtel, RCOM, Dimension Data and Essar. Sanjeev is a Director and co-founder and earlier held the position of CEO of LT Foods (Daawat Rice) covering Middle East and Africa.
dPronto is in talks with investors to raise INR 700 million to further expand its operations in India and emerge as the leading choice for ecommerce companies for their last mile delivery needs.
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