New benchmarks in predictive digital logistics
One of India’s fastest growing startups with a 280 per cent increase in ARR year on year, FarEye is enabling predictability and real-time visibility with its digital logistics platform
FarEye is a global predictive logistics platform that focuses on solving the complicated last-mile delivery issues on a mobile platform. The startup was founded in 2013 by three engineering graduates – Kushal Nahata, Gautam Kumar and Gaurav Srivastava, while they were experimenting with a few technological solutions solving everyday challenges; they identified a gap in the e-commerce industry.
“The consumers had an excellent experience till the time they were shopping online, but when it came to delivery of those orders, it becomes pathetic. They had no information when their order would arrive and in what condition. This led the team to work on a solution that enabled logistics organisations to manage the orders in an efficient and transparent manner. After talking to several e-commerce players, FarEye tied up with Jabong to help its then logistics arm GoJavas with product delivery,” says Khushal Nahata, CEO & Co-founder, FarEye, adding that FarEye started with automating the entire process and making it digitalised so that the rider and the parcel were traceable real-time. Everyone involved in the process – delivery boys, logistics company, e-commerce player and the customer could see immediate value in the solution, and it was an instant hit.
Starting as a bootstrapped venture, FarEye raised the first round of funding within two years and which was successfully followed by two other rounds. In November 2018, FarEye acquired Dipper Technologies, an IoT platform that provides visibility and predictability in freight movement; reinforcing the organisation’s plans to solve challenges by having cutting edge technology for carriers and shippers in moving goods. With the acquisition, FarEye diversified its product portfolio with three offerings: FarEye Delivery, FarEye Fulfillment and FarEye Transportation.
“Today FarEye, is one of India’s fastest growing startups with a 280 per cent increase in ARR year on year. As enablers of logistics excellence, FarEye facilitates over 10 million transactions per day, enabling more than 150 enterprises across 20+ countries to achieve superior delivery experience using mobility, data analytics and automation. Over the last financial year, the company also grew its employee strength to over 300, received more than 30 awards and was recognised by Gartner eight times for its real-time visibility and vehicle routing technologies,” mentions Nahata.
Innovation focus
Enabling predictability and real-time visibility of goods movements, FarEye is constantly bringing innovations to market with products like elastic logistics, food logistics, delivery happiness score and powerful analytics module, et al.
“We empower global leaders with predictive visibility to gain advanced insights and operational KPIs across all legs, modes, stakeholders, to achieve on-time deliveries at reduced costs,” says Nahata. Working and scaling with multiple clients like DHL, Blue Dart, Amway, FSC, Maruti Suzuki, Godrej and many others in the coming years, have helped the company realise that a tracking solution is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to solving the many problems that the logistics industry was facing.
There was a huge scope in optimising the entire process and making it much more efficient. “Delivery is the first actual touch-point with the end-customer for a brand in an e-commerce landscape, making it so much more important. With the right processes in place, deliveries could be converted from just an executional task to a brand differentiator. There is a great potential for businesses to generate new revenue streams from the logistics operations and provide delightful delivery experiences to end-customers,” states Nahata, pointing out that this further led the team to build a workflow engine- a first in the industry that enables enterprises to reduce time to build new delivery processes from a quarter(s) to week(s) including testing and scaling.
Customer segments
FarEye works with enterprises globally with offices in India, Singapore, Dubai, London and Chicago. Customers include industries like automotive, manufacturing, metals and mining, cement, e-commerce, retail and LSPs with solutions for all logistics legs, modes and models- dedicated fleet, outsourced and hybrid. “With our predictive visibility platform, we helped Tata Steel reduce pilferage and theft by 57 per cent, increased ‘on-time in full’ deliveries for Hilti by 6 per cent, and increased the ‘delivery-in-first-attempt’ success rate for Blue Dart by 22 per cent,” says Nahata, informing that while DHL eCommerce increased courier productivity by 15 per cent, the world’s largest pizza chain reduced delivery TAT by 27 per cent with FarEye’s gamification technology.
Explaining how FarEye is on a mission to revolutionise the logistics industry, he adds that they address key inefficiencies in processes and making them transparent. “In the face of dynamic change across all industries, no one solution fits all. We understand this and that is why we have figured out innovative solutions to the most complex of problems in the supply chain,” states Nahata. According to him, the company stands out from the competition because of its :
* Integration capabilities: Pre-existing networks and seamless integration with heterogeneous IT systems like CMS, ERP, WMS, TMS & IoT ecosystems
* Platform capabilities: A process orchestration and automation platform with DIY logistics libraries to create custom workflows as per business and regional needs
* Tech capabilities: Machine learning based engine to get actionable insights, to boost perfect delivery outcomes and gain predictive visibility
Future plans
The company is focused on removing the unpredictability from B2B & B2C deliveries and add a layer of real time visibility and predictive intelligence in freight movement. “At FarEye we aim to make a difference to how deliveries are made- making them more accurate, on-time and at a reduced cost to the shipper. Whether it is an artificial limb reaching a hospital or auto parts reaching a manufacturing unit or simply groceries, the importance of deliveries being made on time and in the right condition cannot be ignored,” says Nahata.
Clocking triple-digit revenue growth since the past three years, Nahata and his team is now targeting a 325 per cent growth in revenue this fiscal. “With three new articulated product lines and leadership position in India, Middle East and South East Asia we are now aiming for massive growth from US & Europe markets,” he remarks.
The unique offering of workflow based platform coupled with data and intelligence enables enterprises to invest not just for today but also for future needs in the supply chain. “We are looking to strengthen our integration capabilities to offer a complete plug & play model to businesses. In order to accelerate the product development further, we plan to hire 100 more employees in this fiscal,” shares Nahata.
India is currently the fastest growing market for FarEye. Here the company envisions further growth opportunity, specifically on the transportation side. Nahata believes that a lot of manufacturers are now looking at reducing their transportation cost. This is inspired from the ecommerce wave; that if e-commerce organisations can move goods in one day or two days, the same timelines can be expected in heavy goods movements as well.
