Startup Pando gets Rs 64cr in Series A

Chennai-based logistics tech startup Pando has raised Rs 64 crore (roughly $9 million) in a Series A funding round led by VC firm Chiratae Ventures with participation from Siemens’ venture investment arm Next47, and existing investor Nexus Venture Partners.

Pando is Next47’s first investment in Asia.

This is Pando’s second institutional round after a seed round of around $2 million in March 2018, and with this, the startup has raised over Rs 80 crores, to date.

Without disclosing the valuation at which the current funding was raised, Pando co-founder and CEO Nitin Jayakrishnan told TOI that the startup has grown its valuation ‘a little over 3x’ since the last raise. Lak Ananth, MD, Next47, and TC Meenakshisundaram, founder MD, Chiratae Ventures join the startup’s board. The funding round also saw participation from marquee angel investors including VMWare India's Ramkumar Narayan, Indifi CEO Alok Mittal, and Saikiran Krishnamurthy of xto10x Ventures.

Pando’s platform helps businesses across multiple industries automate and optimize freight management operations, and connects them to logistics vendors and aggregators.

The funds will be used to augment the company's talent and technology and cement its position in the Indian market.

Plans are also on to expand reach of their freight management software in global markets including Europe and South East Asia, Jayakrishnan said.

We have grown our revenues around 3-4x in the last one year with inbound interest for our solution from both Indian clients as well as Indian operations of MNCs, he added. Pando expects to benefit from Chiratae’s expertise in the consumer software space, and believes that Next47's experience of working with similar global logistics tech enterprises will help them scale faster.

The startup's development and engineering team is based out of Chennai with sales teams across Bengaluru, Bombay and Delhi.