In an interview with Gulf News, Gaurav Biswas, the founder of Trukker, talked about his business plans for expansion in the GCC region. He admitted his company would close its Series A round of funding of nearly USD 1 million by the end of the next month.
Biswas also added that he was very selective when it came to choosing investors. It was a strategic move and helped the company scale up in the region. The Dubai-founded start-up was currently targeting new market entries. In the next nine to twelve months, Trukker would make its first steps in Kuwait and Oman. By the end of 2017, it would enter Saudi Arabia.
Talking about how the idea of Trukker was born, Biswas said it was out of necessity. One day he realized how difficult it was to find a truck to move something big, the furniture of a two-bedroom apartment for example, or industrial materials to a construction site. Then he thought he needed an Uber of trucks.
One of the biggest effects for the local people using Trukker was the standardization of prices for such services. Before Trukker, there was a vast gulf in prices quoted for that. The prices ranged from Dh900 to Dh2,100 for the same thing, and it was not even clear what the customers got for paying more.
Trukker standardized not only the prices but also the quality. It offered three pricing schemes, with clear explanations on what you got for each one. As a result, Trukker quickly became one of the top vendors for house moving.
It was not always this way, remembered Biswas. He left his high profile job in the construction industry to focus on the start-up and to get it off the ground. Trukker was self-funded for quite a lot of time, said the founder. The team invested own capital of USD300, 000 to build it from scratch, and this was the biggest difference between Trukker and the other start-ups. Its founders continued investing in its growth long before it started making profits.
Biswas commented he was pretty satisfied with the progress in the consumer market. Now the company was changing the focus to the business market, and more specifically, to the B2B market. According to the founder, there were some inefficiencies in the corporate moving world. For instance, people did not know when the delivery would arrive; they often received invoices on paper and in most of the cases, they did not fill trucks on their return journey. Trukker technologies could solve all these issues, said Biswas with confidence.
The cross-border movements were next in line in his agenda, continued Biswas. The company already started testing the service, and soon they would also expand across the region. As Trukker relied on word of mouth so far, Biswas would use part of the funding for a massive marketing campaign to make the company more recognizable. He also pointed out that Trukker would not turn into a freight company. It would also not lease trucks. It would strictly remain an aggregator that brought supply and demand together.