Nishith Rastogi and Geet Garg are emblematic of the types that think robots and machines can run the world. In 2015, they founded Locus, a state-of-the-art decision-making platform for logistics. It is the company’s vision that by 2020, Locus should be able to automate all human decisions involved in moving anything or anyone from Point A to Point B.
Rastogi and Garg used to work on Amazon Web Services’ machine learning product. As Rastogi told BW Businessworld in 2017, “In December 2014, was the infamous Delhi Uber incident. In a world that seemed a little unsafe, my sister had come to Bengaluru and was travelling back home from the airport at night. That triggered the most irrational fear in me.
“My co-founder and I decided to do something about the situation. We developed RideSafe, a real-time route deviation detection mobile application for women safety.”
What was completely unexpected was that food-tech companies started adopting RideSafe to monitor the movement of their delivery staff. “We realised that the programming used in RideSafe wasn’t just meant as a safety app but could be revolutionary even in the logistics industry.”
Much of Locus’s technology is complicated. “Locus makes sure the movement happens within budget and on-time taking into consideration numerous depots, vehicles, and customers,” says Rastogi.
To give you a simple example, if you have a 1,000 tasks to be completed and 20 vehicles to do these tasks, Locus’s route planning and optimisation will provide the best route that can be taken by each vehicle to complete the tasks and will also minimise the number of vehicles used to complete them.
“Over the years, Locus’s technology has been adopted across different industry verticals. Clients in the furniture business see a 25 per cent increase in efficiency. There’s a 100 per cent jump in the number of orders per vehicle for intra-city C2C deliveries and a 75 per cent increase in orders per delivery boy in food tech and laundry. The grocery companies have seen a 15 per cent increase in efficiency,” says Rastogi.
Disruptors like Locus are only as good as its technology. “The backbone of Locus is our technical expertise,” says 29-year-old Rastogi. Of the 50-member strong Locus team many of the platform engineers come from top educational hubs such as IIT Kharagpur; BITS Pilani; Carnegie Mellon University, US, and TIFR.
Some of the features built by Locus engineers are the Packman, a 3D packaging software, which can tell you how to load cargo so that space utilisation is maximised to achieve over 80 per cent of vehicle volume utilisation in just 60 seconds, and a route planning engine, which plans delivery routes factoring in real-time traffic and weather conditions.
This ambitious bunch is now considering drone usage. “Optimistically looking at the future, we want to automate deliveries using drones and self-driving vehicles, leading to efficiency and consistency in the entire delivery process,” says Rastogi. In early 2017, Rastogi told BW Businessworld, “In India, the freight industry is estimated at $100 billion and contributes to 6 per cent of the GDP. A bulk of this is inter-city logistics.”
Aspirations for disruption have only grown at Locus as Rastogi reiterates, “By 2020, we aim to automate all human decisions in dispatching a package from Point A to Point B, and have recently setup a hardware lab to take steps towards our hardware automation. We are looking to expand our team to get the best talent and are also focusing on new markets like Southeast Asia and the Middle East.”
A year on, Locus is trying their best to automate the whole wide world.
Growth potential: In India, the freight industry is estimated at over $100 billion and growing at a CAGR of around 20 per cent and constitutes around 6 per cent of the GDP. A bulk of this comes from inter-city logistics and from unorganised freight carriers. If Locus can become the software that automates freight transportation, then that is a large business opportunity.