With the advent of the digital revolution in the country, even big and cumbersome tasks like logistics have become handy. To aid this process with digital excellence, Mudasar Mohamed, Raymond Gillon, and Nicky Lum found Ezyhaul in 2016.
Ezyhaul is a leading digital road freight platform in Southeast Asia. Using the online platform clients can make bookings with Ezyhaul for B2B domestic short-haul, long-haul, and cross-border shipments. This platform offers the freedom of choice of a marketplace and the security & convenience of a digital freight forwarder.
Ezyhaul - Company Highlights
| Startup Name | Ezyhaul |
|---|---|
| Headquarter | Bangalore |
| Sector | Logistics |
| Founders | Mudasar Mohamed, Raymond Gillon, and Nicky Lum |
| Founded | 2016 |
| Parent Organization | Ezyhaul |
| Website | ezyhaul.com |
About Ezyhaul and How it Works
Ezyhaul - Industry Details
Ezyhaul - Founders and team
How was Ezyhaul Started
Ezyhaul - Name, Tagline, and Logo
Ezyhaul - Startup Launch
Ezyhaul - Business Model and Revenue Model
Ezyhaul - Startup Challenges
Ezyhaul - Competitors
Ezyhaul - Funding and Investors
Ezyhaul - Growth
Ezyhaul - Awards
Ezyhaul - Future Plans
StartupTalky
About Ezyhaul and How it Works
Ezyhaul is a leading digital road freight platform in South Asia. Using their online platform, clients can make bookings with Ezyhaul for B2B domestic short-haul, long-haul, and cross-border shipments. They offer the freedom of choice of a marketplace and the security and convenience of a digital freight forwarder.
Ezyhaul is essentially a modern-day digital broker that solves three main problems in logistics — scale, professionalism, and analytics. Their platform allows clients to make online bookings for domestic and cross-border transportation services.
The application accepts shipments, maximizes vehicle utilization, and reduces empty backhauls. The platform also provides real-time track and trace visibility and access to e-documentation, invoicing, and e-PODs (proof of delivery). Ezyhaul also recently launched an advanced control tower that monitors truck movements, provides intelligent exception alerts, and predicts estimated time of arrival for shipments through advanced algorithms.
The vision that drives an extremely innovative platform like Ezyhaul is to transform transportation logistics by building an ecosystem around shippers, truckers, government agencies, and third-party service providers. The core belief of the company is to bring technology into the forefront of the transport industry which has historically been paper-based and full of manual processes.
StartupTalky
Ezyhaul - Industry Details
Ezyhaul works across sectors and some of their clients on demand-side include Reliance, Exide, Pidilite, Shell, Amazon, etc. On the Supply-side, the company works typically with small and medium side transportation companies. Since they operate in India and South East Asia, the app equally concentrates on both the market.
Southeast Asian transport market size is $36 billion and the Indian transport market size is $160 billion. In the next five years, the team is expecting an increase in digitization in the transport space with faster adoption of new-age technologies and they believe that Ezyhaul will be a resource for this change.
Ezyhaul - Founders and Team
In 2016, former colleagues Mudasar Mohamed, Raymond Gillon, and Nicky Lum co-founded Ezyhaul.
Ezyhaul cofounders were colleagues at UTI worldwide. Raymond Gillon is dutch, Nicky Lum is Malaysian and Mudasar Mohamed is an Indian. The three co-founders spoke, discussed, planned about launching a startup on digital broker model and transport space. Just a month later, Ezyhaul was incorporated.
- Raymond Gillon, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer - He was a Managing Director (Vietnam and Cambodia) in UTI Worldwide Inc. He is an Engineer and MBA from INSEAD.
- Mudasar Mohamed, Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer - He was Managing Director (Singapore and Malaysia) in UTI Worldwide Inc. He is an Engineer and MBA from the University of Southern California – Marshall School of Business.
- Nicky Lum, Co-Founder and Director - He had Sales Roles in companies like UTI Worldwide Inc and Kuehne Nagel.
Given that the company operates in multiple countries, the founders have split their time in different markets. For example, Mudasar takes care of India while Raymond, Nicky along with a couple of more professionals take care of South East Asia. Other executive team members of Ezyhaul are: Mark Debattista - Vice President of Sales, and Eric Soo - Head of Technology.
Ezyhaul has over 150 employees and the co-founders firmly believe in creating a joyful, respectful, and humane environment for all members of the company.
StartupTalky
Ezyhaul - How did it start?
The three co-founders earlier used to work at a Multinational Corporation logistics corporate in Singapore. They all had leadership goals and roles in Logistics Company. Observing the supply-and-demand problem for large businesses, together they decided to start up a company to solve the problem.
When two of the co-founders were working in the United States, they realized that in the transport industry, the concept of brokers is very common. At the same time, digital platforms like Uber were revolutionizing in the action of demand-and-supply in the transport space. Understanding it all, the co-founders saw an opportunity to re-engineer the historical broker model and use modern technologies to connect demand-and-supply.
To revalidate the model, the founders spoke to several leaders from the logistics industry to receive feedback. The response which they received from the leaders of supply and chain was very encouraging, almost all of them told the co-founders to go for it. Five of them became their early investors and Ezyhaul raised $800,000 from angel investors which helped them in expanding the business operations in Malaysia for a year and a half.
Ezyhaul - Name, Tagline, and Logo
The idea behind Ezyhaul’s name is that if you break it into two words: Ezy means making things Easy and Haul is the short form of Haulage which means the commercial transport of goods. So ideally it perfectly justified the company's mission to create a very easy platform for trucking industries; hence the name Ezyhaul.
The company's tagline is "Transportation made Ezy". It describes the motto of the company.
StartupTalky
Ezyhaul - Startup Launch
Ezyhaul began as a bootstrapped company.
“It's very tough for somebody to give you money for an idea. So you need to have that conviction to use your own money to at least get the idea off the ground,” said Mudasar, adding, “If you're a first time entrepreneur, you need to show them (Investors) something convincing. So I think bootstrapping with your own money is quite important. It also signals to the investor that you're serious about your business since you’ve put in your own money and that you are prepared to put in the grind.”
All three founders did not draw any salary in the first year of starting up. To launch in a smaller market to assess its product, Ezyhaul began operations in Malaysia first. They soon began getting offers and had a list of 10 good clients within months.
Backed by the success, Ezyhaul raised a seed fund of $800,000 from Angel investors. From then on, there was no stopping them. After strategic investors pumped in another $25 million, they began expansion into Thailand, followed by India.
Ezyhaul - Business Model and Revenue Model
The clients make online bookings for domestic and cross-border transportation services. The platform includes integrated dynamic route optimization technology that builds the most efficient delivery routes, optimizes vehicle utilization, and minimizes total transportation costs. The profit margin differs from plain regions to high dimensions and it generally lands between 5-20%.
Given that Ezyhaul is into the B2B industry, most of the sales happen through direct sales channels while a small percentage happens through digital marketing. They have a team of experts who handles clients, tie-ups, and marketing.
The startup believes and has been focusing on digitization, so the team has used a combination of both digital marketing and direct sales method to reach out to customers. The factors which worked for them are referrals by existing customers which in turn was an outcome of delighting them with exceptional customer service.
Ezyhaul - Startup Challenges
The biggest challenge in the logistics industry is enabling the drivers to use the application and increasing the adoption of smartphones amongst the driver community. The smartphone adoption is a challenge in South East Asia and India. Ezyhaul mitigated that challenge and partnered with multiple telecoms that help in getting drivers discounts on handsets and data.
StartupTalky
Ezyhaul - Competitors
Ezyhaul’s proprietary technology has been a core differentiator especially route optimization. They have been able to reduce the client’s transport spend nearly by 15% through the Ezyhaul platform. The algorithms that Ezyhaul has created takes care of the company’s pricing aspect as well as route and lane.
The top 10 competitors in Ezyhaul's competitive set are GoGoVan, Lalamove, Ninja Van, Deliveree, Dada, Logivan, Xdel Singapore, Cargobase, GoJavas and Whitebox.
Ezyhaul - Funding and Investors
For any startup it is a massive vote of confidence when an existing investor does a follow up round and more so when the investment triple their outlay. The first round of funding was $800,000 from angel investors and this helped the company in expanding the business in Malaysia for a year and a half. The company has raised $5 million in Series A round in 2018 and recently raised $16 million in Series B from the same strategic investor.
| Date | Stage | Amount | Investor |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | Seed Round | $840K | Undisclosed |
| 2018 | Series A | $5 million | Undisclosed |
| 2019 | Series B | $16 million | Undisclosed |
StartupTalky
Ezyhaul - Growth
Ezyhaul has grown more than 900% and has struck partnerships from leading companies that allowed the propagation of the clients. They have been able to draw out references from a lot of their existing clients.
With more than 30,000 trucks serving the market of Southeast Asia, the team now has set its sights on India, which is a huge market, and where despite the many innovations, the transportation industry remains fragmented but Ezyhaul, which is operational in Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand believes there’s room for more.
Ezyhaul - Awards and Recognition
Ezyhaul’s biggest achievement so far as being the first transport startup in the transport industry which is multinational and they are progressing and expanding year after year.
Recently Ezyhaul backed the Accenture-Freight & Logistics ASEAN Innovator Award!
Ezyhaul - Future Plans
Ezyhaul is one of the few startups who serve in multiple countries. Most startups prefer to operate in a single set up. However Ezyhaul operates in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and India.
In the next two years, Ezyhaul will be penetrating in further industry markets. In the next five years, the team is expecting an increase in digitization in the transport space with faster adoption of new-age technologies and they believe that Ezyhaul will be a resource for this change.
Author: Rishabh Rathi
Source : https://startuptalky.com/ezyhaul-success-story/
Date : 2020-08-24T12:59:00.000Z