On-demand logistics startup Townrush raises seed funding from Lightspeed

Bengaluru-based B2B logistics delivery company Townrush has raised seed funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners. The undisclosed amount is being invested into the company's physical infrastructure, technological development, and scaling up its core team.
Cofounder Saurya Prakash was a senior business analyst at Flipkart when he recognized a gaping opportunity in hyperlocal supply chain.

"The traditional hub-and-spoke model (by which delivery is centered around fulfillment hubs) would not work at scale at a hyperlocal level. You have to re-think traditional logistics models, payments infrastructure and combine it with customer focus to make deliveries a delightful experience," he said.

Townrush was launched this May by Prakash, fellow Flipkart employee Ashutosh Banerjee, and Tushar Bisht, formerly a software engineer with Facebook.

It charges merchants to deliver goods within 30 minutes, and is now completing 500 orders a day within Bengaluru. The company is aiming to expand to all major Tier-1 and -2 cities by the end of the year, said Prakash.

The funding round is yet another in a series of investments that have been made in hyperlocal logistics companies lately, including Roadrunnr, Parcelled, and Mumbai-based Grab.

"Mobile is connecting consumers with hyperlocal merchants and bringing retail, food, and grocery market online, necessitating a new type of hyperlocal logistics network," commented Maninder Gulati, principal at Lightspeed Venture Partners, who has also invested in LocalOye, a home services marketplace. "Townrush, unlike most teams we met, has a disruptive algorithmic and heuristic based approach to building an optimized delivery network. The team has immense relevant experience in first-hand witnessing and solving such problems at their previous startups."