Stride Ventures, based in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, has thus become the first venture-debt lender to the tech-enabled freight forwarding company. Stride Ventures, a homegrown venture loan fund, has invested Rs 20 crore in Wiz Freight, a full-stack digital freight forwarder that provides importers and exporters with door-to-door international freight solutions, the firm stated on January 13.
Speaking about the prospects of the company, Wiz Freight Co-founder Ramkumar Govindarajan said: “Cross-border shipping has been the backbone of global trade and the last two years have seen unprecedented disruptions in the international supply chain driving prices and inventory shortages. We have been able to help our customers minimise disruptions with better visibility, planning, and real-time shipment control using our tech platform.” He added: “We have grown 25x in the last 12 months and have established a presence across 10 Indian cities. We are planning to invest in hiring, tech development, and global expansion in 2022. We are happy to partner with Stride Ventures in this journey.”
Stride Ventures has thus become the first venture-debt lender to the tech-enabled freight forwarding firm based in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. The venture debt fund’s total investments in portfolio firms have now surpassed Rs 1000 crores across both of its debt funds, which provide tailored finance solutions to entrepreneurs. Commenting on the funding, Ishpreet Singh Gandhi, Founder, Stride Ventures, said: “Wiz Freight has been successful in growing consistently and onboarding key corporates while sustaining margins in a highly volatile freight market. In spite of the pandemic affecting the wider freight and logistics industry, large-scale digitisation has led to newer solutions. With Wiz, we are very keen and excited to be a part of their journey towards expanding global reach and creating disruptions in the international supply chain.”
Notably, digital supply chain solutions such as Wiz Freight – which offer end-to-end shipment management solutions including price discovery, booking management, shipment tracking, customer support, etc — are becoming increasingly important in the modern-day shipment industry. Digital freight management platform Wiz Freight has raised USD 3.5 million (about Rs 26 crore) in seed funding led by Axilor. The company offers door-to-door multimodal logistics solutions to its customers. The seed round also saw participation from Arali Ventures and Foundamental, along with angel investors Ramakant Sharma, co-founder of Livspace and Daniel Richner, chairman of the M+R Spedag Group, a Swiss-based logistics firm, the startup and Axilor said in a joint statement.
Its customer roster includes the likes of the Tatas, Adani group, Mahindra, Aditya Birla, Renew Power, Hero Motors, ITC, and Marico, among others. Axilor seed funds startups — which are into small business digitisation, commerce and logistics, consumer segment and health tech — and has so far seed-funded 42 startups. With over 350 founders, Axilor probably has the largest community of founders.
Founded by logistics veterans Ramkumar Govindarajan and Ramkumar Ramachandran exactly a year ago in Chennai, Wiz’s full-stack platform allows enterprises and small businesses to automate their cross-border logistics operations. Wiz began with a single offering of ocean import solutions from China, but today, it offers export and import solutions via ocean and to and from on all major international trade locations, offering door-to-door multimodal solutions and serve over 200 customers across India, Southeast Asia and the Middle East.
News Summary:
- Stride Ventures invests Rs 20 crore in Wiz Freight, a digital freight forwarder
- Check all news and articles from the latest Business news updates.
