4X Serial Entrepreneur from India: Kashyap Deorah, CEO of HyperTrack (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What was the new idea?

Kashyap Deorah: On-demand commerce was called hyperlocal. I was fascinated with the Stripe and Twilio API businesses. In retail and e-commerce, what shovels can I build? What became clear was on-demand commerce is about the ability to fulfill things right here right now. The proposition is ingrained in logistics.

The logistics model relies on some heavy location and mapping infrastructure that only a few companies have. Backed with a theme of democratizing disaggregated markets, how about democratizing this location and mapping infrastructure for all the e-commerce players in the world. It became the logistics API for on-demand commerce.

Sramana Mitra: From what I understand, Twilio is a big piece of Uber’s technology. The competitors of Twilio has been acquired by Vonage which has been acquired by Ericsson. There is an Indian company called Plivo that has the same technology. Was that part of your technology or did you do everything on your own?

Kashyap Deorah: Just as Twilio enables communication and Stripe enables payments, we were enabling the logistics. We used a lot of other APIs. That has become the way of building new technology any way.

Sramana Mitra: Location-specific stuff was more of your sweet sauce.

Kashyap Deorah: Yes, route optimization, location-based dispatch, and order tracking. We saw that a lot of logistics efficiencies rely on location enablement.

Sramana Mitra: You were doing this out of Delhi?

Kashyap Deorah: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: Was this going to be for the Indian market first?

Kashyap Deorah: Right from the start, it was global-first. We said, “Geography matters less now. The world is doing business over the internet.” We needed digital maps and smartphone OS. Right after that, we got a lot of horizontal usage across industries and regions. There was more trust in the India ecosystem because we were located there.

Sramana Mitra: Did you draw from your old network like the Future group network?

Kashyap Deorah: Yes. What I realized was the biggest network that gravitated towards it was the Golden Tap network – the book. There was just a lot of freshness around that. The book had just been released. The investors who read it were interested in the HyperTrack journey. The early team that got formed were people who read the book. It really spoke to them. Similarly, early customers as well.

Sramana Mitra: You raised money for this?

Kashyap Deorah: Yes, this was now my fourth rodeo. The idea got traction quickly. We ended up raising about $8.5 million back in 2016.

Sramana Mitra: What did you have in place already when you raised?

Kashyap Deorah: We had a released product. We had early paying customers – maybe about a dozen. We had 10 people in the team.

Sramana Mitra: That first part was how long?

Kashyap Deorah: It was about a year.

Sramana Mitra: You financed that yourself?

Kashyap Deorah: With every successive company, you get the chance to take up more ownership and see it through to a better place before you bring in investors. The first year was all my money. Then we brought in investors.

Sramana Mitra: Was Nexus the first investor?

Kashyap Deorah: There were two seed rounds that happened in quick succession. One was Ashish Gupta from Helion. Around that time, I met Naren. That was November 2016. I was visiting the Bay Area and told Naren that I would be ready to pitch to him next summer. He said why next summer. He anchored the first offer.

There was another fund that was able to accelerate and compete with Naren. By the end of those three weeks, it was clear to me that I had to work with Naren. I felt there was some connection. We joined hands in December 2016.

This segment is part 5 in the series : 4X Serial Entrepreneur from India: Kashyap Deorah, CEO of HyperTrack
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