India's BlackBuck closes Series E, becomes unicorn
BlackBuck, India’s largest trucking platform, has raised $67 million in Series E funding led by US-based Tribe Capital, IFC Emerging Asia Fund, and VEF at a valuation of $1 billion.
Sweden’s VEF, a developing markets and financial technology specialist, also participated, contributing $10 million and noting BlackBuck’s strengths in combining fintech, logistics, and transportation concepts in a rapidly scaling marketplace. Existing investors Wellington Management, Sands Capital, and the International Finance Corporation (IFC) re-upped.
The IFC Emerging Asia Fund falls under the purview of IFC Asset Management, an arm of the development finance institution that offers third-party investors access to its emerging markets deal pipeline. Other investments in BlackBuck came from IFC directly.
Total funds raised to date amount to about $300 million, with Goldman Sachs and Accel having led a $150 million Series D in 2019 with support from Wellington, Sands, and IFC. Previous investors also include Sequoia Capital, B Capital, Tiger Global Management, and DST Global.
Walmart-controlled Flipkart, India’s largest e-commerce company, which has received backing from Tiger and Accel, is also an investor. Flipkart raised $3.6 billion at a valuation of $37.6 billion earlier this month. Its logistics and supply chain services are handled by its Ekart business.
BlackBuck was founded in 2015 as an Uber-like service aimed at India’s highly fragmented intercity trucking industry by connecting long-haul truckers directly with customers through a mobile app. The company markets itself as “reshaping the infrastructure around trucking to facilitate tolling, fuelling, telematics, and financial services.”
The company claims to have a more than 90% share of all online trucking activity with some 10,000 clients, including Hindustan Unilever, Reliance, Coca Cola, and Tata Group. There are around 700,000 truckers and 1.2 million trucks on the platform, which records more than 15 million transactions a month across 700 districts and 1,000 industrial hubs across India.
“BlackBuck started with a dream to re-imagine trucking, to make it 10x simple and 10x efficient. It has been six years and we are just getting started to make a difference,” Rajesh Yabaji, co-founder and CEO of BlackBuck, said in a statement.
“We continue to dedicate ourselves for the foreseeable future to solve fundamental Indian trucking problems. The new financing round gives us more firepower to invest in fundamentally hard trucking problems and continue deepening our reach and impact.”
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