The popular Pakistani trucking marketplace Truck It In has raised about $1.5M in a pre-seed round and was announced today. This Karachi-based popular trucking marketplace has pretty much managed to create one of the largest pre-seed investments raised by a startup in the entire Middle East, Pakistan, and North Africa also saw the engagement of Deosai Ventures, +92 Ventures, Fatima Gobi Ventures, BitRate Venture Capital along with several angel investors including Founders of Wayve which is a London-based autonomous driving startup and with some members of Cereem’s leadership. The pre-seed round was led by Global Founders Capital.
The marketplace was founded back in August last year, and since then it has been helping connect shippers and truckers via their own online platform. It’s very simple for shippers including different businesses. The platform itself allows access to a lot of different innovative features including a reliable fleet of trucks at affordable prices along with live-tracking and other tech insights. On the other side of the platform, the truckers receive instant assurance for loads and instant return trips which is usually the problem for every trucker. The startup however takes profit from every completed trip.
“The current middlemen heavy industry relies on traditional calling and mental notes to match truckers with shippers. We are going to solve the supply chain inefficiencies in a $25 billion market, that is growing faster than its regional peers, to help unlock more than $1 Billion for Pakistani businesses. Our operations team is working round the clock to onboard more truckers on the platform as we seek to bring efficiency to this market. We offer higher utilization to truckers by reducing their idle time, as well as providing them with back-haul loads, which results in higher engagement of truckers on our platform,”
From our pilot, we have been pursuing the market differently. We have built a high-performance team that knows the space deeply and is building localized products. Our access to supply is much stronger due to the strategic partnerships and the personal backgrounds of the founders. We are very focused on our own journey and realizing our vision.
The participation of Fatima Gobi Ventures will also serve Truck It In well as the limited partners of the fund represent major industries of Pakistan with sizable shipping operations. Its General Partner Ali Mukhtar, commenting on the investment, said, “Having backed successful investments in this space in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia, we are excited to add our first trucking portfolio company in Pakistan. We believe the team is well-positioned to lead the disruption in the trucking sector and we look forward to joining the company in its journey, not just to solve challenging old-world logistics problems but also to add significant social value to the livelihood of individual and SME truck owners across the country.” said the Co-Founder and CEO of Truck It In, Muhammad Sarmad Farooq.
The platform itself is becoming pretty competitive with some rivals for startups in Pakistan and that’s not all. There are several regional players already expanding to the country for the last year or so. But with these latest funds, their aim is to expand their operations by innovating their services across the region by making a better experience for both ends of the platform.
