BridgeLinx technologies a startup headquartered in Lahore which operates as a digital freight marketplace. The startup announced that it raised $10 million in the seed funding round of Pakistan.
It intends that it will use the capital which helps it to advance the company’s technology, and it will bring in new talent which the co-founder and chief executive of BridgeLinx Salman Gul told TechCrunch.
Investment
Harry Stebbings’ 20 VC, Josh Buckley’s Buckley Ventures, and Indus Valley Capital co-lead the financing round of the company. Wavemaker Partners, Quiet Capital, TrueSight Ventures, Soma Capital, Flexport, Magnus Rausing’s UNTITLED, and founders of Convoy and Bazaar also participated in the round.
About The Company
BridgeLinx is a digital freight marketplace. It combines production companies with providers of transport such as private fleets and truckers.
The company provides solutions to port operations, documentation, booking, and tracking and offers coverage to transport lanes in the country.
The company BridgeLinx boards thousands of carriers and transports thousands of large loads every day to customers. Gul said.
The company didn’t show the exact numbers but hinted that the platform is used by Pakistan’s Biggest textile industries, manufacturers of cement industries, agro-businesses, manufacturers of electronics, chemicals industries, and online marketplaces, “More than a fifth of Pakistan’s top 100 exporters actively use BridgeLinx to move freight.”
The company offers end-to-end solutions for loads, that start from matching to the payments. Companies also can use BridgeLinx’s app to select types of vehicles and book them. The scheduling, routing technologies match with the most reliable, cost-effective, and efficient transportation partner, BridgeLinx notes on its website, saying that customers can also trace their shipments live inside the app. The platform plus gives access to all shipment-related documents.
The Problem
As is true in India, Pakistan’s trucking operation has a big inefficiency problem that proceeds to drag the economy.
1 of the greatest difficulties faced by truckers is that once they made the transportation, they have no task left during the return trip. So a vehicle transporting something to Karachi from Islamabad is expected not to carry something on the way to the nation’s capital. This decades-old inefficiency proceeds to cost every stakeholder.
Gul also stated that his fellow co-founders are discovering methods to resolve the country’s road freight inefficiency problems and there are now working to develop a hybrid of the companies of India like BlackBuck and Rivigo.
Like BlackBuck, the company doesn’t have any vehicles of its own, but Gul said that the startup envisions now owns some of the fleets like Rivigo has that will help to ensure the 24 hours service to customers.