Dispatch Network Raises ₹5 Crore Pre-Seed Round Led by Antler India to Boost Rider Earnings with AI-Powered Logistics

The Pune-based last-mile network is doubling its order volumes every month, with rider retention 80% better than the industry average.

Dispatch, a last-mile delivery network built around what a rider earns, has raised ₹5 crore pre-seed led by Antler India, with participation from angel investors Krishi Fagwani, founder of Thrive, Yashin Mahadevia and Parth Modwadhia. This is the company's first public funding announcement.

The problem

Every delivery app today has its own high-demand hours and likewise slack periods. The result is that riders spend much of their shift waiting or riding empty, up to 50% of their kilometres without an order. The rider pays for every one of those kilometres. Nobody pays the rider.

Dispatch's view is that the fleet that can sustainably pay riders the most will win supply, and the only way to pay more is to make every hour on the road more productive.

What Dispatch is building

Dispatch is building a foundation AI model for intracity logistics and mobility. It decides which order a rider should take next and where that rider should wait for the one after, sequencing work across platforms instead of reacting to one order at a time. Traditional fleets chase total order volume, while Dispatch is built to maximise what one rider can do. While other fleets let the rider choose which order they want to do, Dispatch, on the other hand, picks each order for every rider, which it says leads to better sequencing and a significant reduction in empty miles.

This approach has helped Dispatch outperform industry average rider retention numbers.

Dispatch’s Spatio-Temporal Foundation Model

The Large Logistics Spatio-Temporal Model is a foundation model for logistics and mobility, and it learns from viewing the city every minute with millions of parameters, unlike LLMs.

It assigns every order Dispatch delivers, and every decision, and what happened next, becomes training data.

Progress since the round

• 100,000+ deliveries since launch, doubling every month: 3,014 in June and 55,000 in October
• 3500 deliveries a day today.
• Two-thirds fewer empty miles
• Riders take home about 55% more a month, against the industry average.
• Rider retention is 80% better than the industry average.
• Launching the 2nd city, Mumbai, in November

Dispatch delivers for India's major food and quick-commerce platforms, including Zomato, Swiggy, Zepto, Instamart and BigBasket, and for hundreds of restaurants and stores, through its direct APIs and through ONDC.

"There's no chance of coming back empty-handed," said Rahul, 26, a Dispatch rider in Pune. "As soon as I come online, an order comes in fast; I don't have to go around empty looking for hotspots. I earn more because I save more."

What riders are saying

“Riders need more orders, but more importantly, they need the right next order. Every idle minute we remove goes back into a rider's earnings, and that's how we win supply. The last mile ecosystem is fundamentally challenged by design, with inefficiencies at every step. On one hand there is immense unmet demand due to rider shortages; on the other, riders ride up to 50% of their time empty, without an order. Every platform fights for supply; no one makes money. It's absurd. We're reimagining how the last mile works from the ground up; it needs to be fixed structurally across all stakeholders.”, Rajit Arya, Co-founder and CEO, Dispatch Network

“Most of the world's deliveries still run on rules someone wrote by hand. We're building the decision layer for last-mile delivery: which order, which rider, and where they should be next. Pune is our training ground, and every delivery makes the model sharper. The goal is simple: make every hour a rider spends on the road the best-paid hour they can find.”–Navneeth Kannan, Co-founder, Product and AI, Dispatch Network

“Most of last-mile delivery has been optimised for the platform. Rajit and Navneeth started from the rider, and that's what we backed. They've spent half a decade close to the people who actually make these deliveries, and in a few months' time, they've shown that a rider-first network can scale. If every hour on the road keeps getting more productive, supply will follow.” said, Nitin Sharma, Partner, Antler India

Use of funds

The funds will be used to grow the AI team behind LL[ST]M. Dispatch's next goal is 50,000 orders a day across five cities.

About Dispatch Network

Dispatch Network (Artem Network Private Limited) is a last-mile delivery network that uses proprietary AI to make every rider hour more productive. Co-founder Rajit Arya has worked in electric mobility since 2009 and has been working with delivery riders for the past 5 years. Co-founder Navneeth Kannan is a product architect and engineer with a decade in mobility systems. The company moved into last-mile delivery in 2026 and went live in Pune in June 2026.