Hyperlocal delivery seems to be the business to be in, at the moment, it appears. Baxi, a Gurugram-headquartered app-based bike-taxi service has thrown its ring in the arena and is joining hands with Patanjali and Mother Dairy to effect local deliveries of fresh foods, vegetables and fruits. The company has renamed its service B-Fresh from Baxi.
Originally founded in 2015, Baxi started its bike-taxi service in Gurugram. It received a modest funding of around Rs 10 crore from a clutch of investors. But the service did not appeal to the average customer on the road since the demand appeared to be more of the hailing type than an app-based one, at least for the kind of customers availing lifts on two-wheelers to commute within metropolises. It’s about a year since the company stopped these services. Interestingly, the two large app-based cab hailing operators Ola and Uber had also introduced the bike taxis for last mile connectivity and they have closed their activities as well.
It seems to have worked on this new model to keep the startup going. The potential for last mile delivery in a vast country like India can never be underestimated. Some of the major ecommerce companies are desperately trying to improve on this challenging area of making deliveries at doorsteps in the remotest parts of the cities they operate.
Now, they might have used the past few months to rework on their business model and have come up with this solution. They are expected to begin operations in January 2019 and will limit themselves to Gurugram and some parts of Delhi. The idea might be to integrate their delivery team to the app of the client and take over from them after the customer has placed the order and made the payment on the client’s platform. B-Fresh will then make the deliveries. If it works well, it can approach more companies for business.
Eventually, there is competition for B-Fresh in the form of Shadowax, a startup also out of Gurugram, which has received funding to the extent of $22 million (roughly Rs 150 crore). Companies like Swiggy are also planning to foray into hyper-local delivery leveraging their existing infrastructure.