Parcel-it, a Nigerian logistics startup received a huge boost with a new round of funding from venture capitalist firm, GreenTec Capital. The German-based VC company recently announced the investment on its website but declined to reveal how much it has invested in the one-year-old logistics startup.
Parcel it: the smart and better delivery option#parcel #courier #dispatch #lekki pic.twitter.com/bZGtm7GFDf
— Parcel-it (@parcel_it) August 26, 2017
Parcel-it is a Nigerian on-demand logistics startup launched in June 2017. But unlike other startups in this space, Parcel-it aggregates information on courier services and provides a “marketplace” dispatch riders. In other words, the startup is an Uber for delivery companies.
According to GreenTec, Parcel-it is disrupting a pretty huge industry with its innovations.
“The expansion of the middle-class in Nigeria has led to the development of an active and thriving online-retail market servicing a growing number of online shoppers,” the company said on its website. “This thriving e-commerce is limited only by a dearth of convenient on-demand logistics solutions, with the average delivery taking 3 days or longer.”
GreenTec further estimates that the value of this segment of the economy could be worth $13 billion yearly.
On its part, Parcel-it has developed a seemingly robust platform. It allows both independent riders and regular courier companies to register and partner with it. It vets riders and conducts a “thorough” background check on them for security purposes.
Once registered and vetted, the Parcel-it app begins to steer haulage requests to drivers based on their location. So It’s exactly like Uber. However, unlike Uber, Parcel-it also trains its dispatch riders on customer service and how to use the platform.
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— Audiee (@codichinma) August 22, 2017
To encourage more riders to sign up, the app offers a “dual-pricing” system. In other words, the app uses a simple pricing model during regular hours. But it also allows prices to slide up during high traffic periods or for after-hours deliveries. This may entice more riders to sign up, but it doesn’t make any case about how customers themselves see this.
Nevertheless, GreenTec has confidence in Parcel-it which has completed over 200 deliveries and registered ‘hundreds of users’ since its launch. The German VC firm, which also has several investments in many African startups, expects Parcel-it to become stable and expand into other verticals going forward.
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