Trucking startup BlackBuck is India’s 16th unicorn this year after a $67 million fundraise

• The round was led by Tribe Capital, IFC Emerging Asia Fund and VEF.
• The company was valued at $850 million in its Series D round raised in May 2019.
• BlackBuck has over 1.2 million trucks registered on its platform across 700 districts.

Online platform for trucks BlackBuck has entered the unicorn club on Thursday, July 22, after raising $67 million in a new round of funding. The round was led by Tribe Capital, IFC Emerging Asia Fund and Bermuda-based VEF.

A unicorn, in startup parlance, is a private firm valued at or more than $1 billion. According to a few media reports citing anonymous sources, BlackBuck was valued at $1.02 billion.

BlackBuck’s existing investors Wellington Management, Sands Capital and World Bank’s investment arm International Finance Corporation (IFC) also participated in the round. It was valued at $850 million in its last Series D fundraise in 2019.

The company intends to use this funding to further expand and launch new service offerings. It will invest heavily, it said, in product and data science capabilities to get better efficiency in freight matching for the Indian trucking ecosystem. The startup will also scale its financial services and insurance offerings with new partnerships.

“It has been six years and we are just getting started to make a difference. We continue to dedicate ourselves for the foreseeable future to solve fundamental Indian trucking problems. The new financing round gives us more firepower to invest in fundamentally hard trucking problems and continue deepening our reach and impact,” said Rajesh Yabaji, co-founder and chief executive (CEO) of BlackBuck.

BlackBuck was founded in 2015 by Yabaji, Chanakya Hridaya, and Ramasubramaniam. The company has over 1.2 million trucks registered on its platform across 700 districts in over 1,000 industrial hubs. Its customers include Hindustan Unilever, Coca Cola, Asian Paints and Tata Group.

The company’s CEO claims that BlackBuck has witnessed 20-fold growth on the supply side and a 10-fold growth in the demand side over the last two years, thanks to digital adoption.

Arjun Sethi, co-founder and partner at Tribe Capital, added that the company’s ability to measure output and productivity growth has streamlined logistical challenges for the logistics industry over a short time frame.

BlackBuck is the 16th startup to enter the unicorn club this year, compared to 11 unicorns for the whole of 2020.

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