Portfolio Watch: We’re Investing in Locus to Transform Last-mile Delivery

As technology has empowered users to perform multiple tasks with a single click, from ordering groceries to getting the laptop you forgot at home delivered to your workplace within the hour, the line is becoming increasingly blurred between needs and wants, the urgent and non-urgent. Today’s customers are not easy to please. They expect instant gratification and convenience, easy returns, and real-time visibility throughout the order journey.

This puts the customer at the center of all supply chain decisions, leaving enterprises challenged to keep up with changing customer needs. Fierce competition has undermined customer loyalty; there is now added pressure to grow the topline while retaining existing customers, managing costs, and meeting customer service standards. In addition, the ongoing pandemic has driven an unprecedented e-commerce boom while also exposing supply chain pain points. The need for supply chains to dynamically adapt to changed conditions has never been clearer, which is driving a revolution in logistics and supply chain management.

Logistics lies at the core of meeting changing consumer demands. It is now imperative for organizations to add intelligence to their operations, to help them make the right decisions to satisfy customer needs. Enterprises must quickly adapt to automate and digitize their operations, while continuously working to find best-in-class solutions.

Today, we are excited to announce our investment in Locus, a global supply intelligence and logistics planning organization that is enabling the supply chain industry to make dynamic decisions in the logistics and supply chain segment. It’s part of our continued pursuit of solutions that leverage technology to solve operational challenges. At Qualcomm Ventures, we’ve helped multiple market leaders in the logistics space. Portfolio companies Bounce, Shadowfax, and MapMyIndia are category creators in India. Globally, we have invested in several other logistics and mobility companies including FourKites, Airspace, Loggi, 99 (acquired by Didi), and Waze (acquired by Google).

Locus, founded in 2015 by technologist entrepreneurs Nishith Rastogi and Geet Garg, is headquartered in California, USA, with a large engineering team in India. Started as a passion project to solve personal routing problems, it has transformed into an enterprise-grade global platform with a presence in 400-plus cities worldwide, winning the trust of more than 150 large organizations, including Fortune 500 companies like Unilever, Tata, Nestle and Mondelez, among others.

We have followed Locus for more than two years, and we have been consistently impressed by the team’s single-minded focus on using technology to build a highly scalable platform to solve operational challenges in the supply chain, which go beyond visibility into the domain of real-world decision making. Locus has built capabilities that get to the network design layer and can address the everyday needs of any enterprise, no matter the supply chain architecture. Locus has built a sophisticated intelligence layer by triangulating multiple dynamic variables collected from sensors, with static information from the past and present to make real-time decisions. This has enabled the company to navigate difficult markets like India and Southeast Asia and work with complex blue-chip customers. Built from India, and expanding across the globe, Locus is uniquely positioned to seize the huge opportunity in global logistics SaaS and we couldn’t be more excited.

We at Qualcomm Ventures believe the quest to automate our supply chains has just begun and we imagine a world where everything from order to fulfillment is orchestrated in the most seamless fashion. What was once impossible is now today a reality with the adoption of technologies like IoT and EDGE, which give enterprises and startups access to millions of data points and enable real-time visibility. In addition, 5G will bring instant and high-speed computing capabilities, changing the way enterprises use and deploy automation.

We look forward to supporting Locus and its passionate team on its journey to transforming the last-mile delivery.