They call it ‘Project Zoom’ inside Rivigo, a tech-enabled logistics company headquartered in Gurgaon. Essentially, if a family wants to move from Delhi to Mumbai, you notify Rivigo online, listing the items to be transported. Rivigo’s staff of loaders, known as faujis, come to your house to pick up the goods and deliver to your destination. This project has been in the works for around a year at a company in the long-haul trucking tech segment. Rivigo, founded in 2014, has raised north of $100 million from investors SAIF Partners and Warburg Pincus.“Anyone can be client for Project Zoom,” says a source who has been directly involved in the project. Over a third of this 3,000-employees company has been working on it. “The Zoom pick-up connects with our Prime vehicles (that connect warehouse to warehouse across states),” he says. Zoom warehouses are on Rivigo’s books— as are its 2,500 trucks, drivers (‘pilots’) and faujis—not to mention the tech team. Rivigo wants the control, hence it’s taken these costs on board. Project Zoom is among a spate of experiments in long-haul trucking, which has got regulatory fillip over the past year. The logistics industry had anticipated the goods and services tax ( GST ) from late 2015 onward. But what no stakeholder expected was demonetisation on November 8, 2016, which caused pain and also nudged the $260-billion domestic logistics industry toward a cashless economy.The Electronic Way Bill E-way Bill ) is on the anvil under the GST Act , which requires transport companies and small fleet owners to furnish information on the consignment electronically on a portal – before the journey. The government is aiming to organise the logistics industry and bring it into the formal economy, expected to grow to $462 billion by 2020. The technology push from companies such as Rivigo is enabling this complex migration. It is also an opportunity to make the industry more efficient. “With GST, warehouses will become bigger, sizes and fleets of trucks larger, and distances longer,” says Pankaj Naik, co-head of digital and technology investment banking at Avendus. “Return freight and utilisation of truck become very important. That’s the point-to-point problem tech marketplaces will solve.” Venture capital (VC) fund and Flipkart backer Accel Partners, with India headquarters in Bengaluru, made two investments in trucking tech between December 2015 and June 2016. The first was Blackbuck, which also had Flipkart as investor. (Sachin and Binny Bansal had been angel investors in Blackbuck). In long-haul trucking circles, the company is seen as a ‘capital-light’ avatar of Rivigo. Blackbuck doesn’t own its truck fleet or drivers. It has scaled its online marketplace to register over 110,000 trucks, operating from 300 locations, and serves large enterprise customers such as Coco-Cola, ITC and Hindustan Unilever.Accel’s second investment was in a company in which Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani had also invested — 4tigo. As against freight marketplaces, 4tigo network is an exchange catering to transport owners who want spot trades. This need arises when they have excess load because of committed consignments. 4tigo doesn’t engage with the consigner or receiving party—it caters to the transporter.“A transport company may have 10 trucks but contracts that require more,” says Vivek Malhotra, 52, co-founder of 4tigo. “Even the largest companies find their ownership to be only 20% of actual deployment.” Spot trade is on the 4tigo network, which has captured details of trucks and transport companies based on preferred routes drivers operate on. Malhotra hates the analogy of long-haul trucking platforms with cab aggregators such as Uber or Ola. “In an Uber, a driver doesn’t even ask for his destination because they operate in a small range. In our segment, there are multiple actors, and contracts run for days.”Think about it. A single large consignment can involve the party (say, ITC) commissioning the transport company. A spot trade expands number of parties, sometimes involving two or three brokers. There is a receiving party, a warehouse (consignee). “A contract runs for several days. The whole thing has to be managed and settled. We manage the trade and fulfilment,” Malhotra explains.More than 80% of overall logistics spend in India lies in the unorganised sector, according to a KPMG report, India Warehousing, Transportation and Logistics. Trucking forms the largest share of the industry. “Almost 85% of the Indian trucking market is made up of small fleet owners with 5-20 trucks,” notes an Avendus 2016 report, Logistics Tech. “As truckers are regional, 30-50% of forward truckloads return empty. It results in bloated forward rates and heavily intermediated returns with multiple brokers involved.”This is where technology companies are looking to bring in efficiencies with their approach. Both Rivigo and Blackbuck are products of the digital economy. Blackbuck was funded by Flipkart, while Rivigo counts Amazon India among its largest customers. While ecommerce companies mostly depend on captive logistics arms, rising costs are an issue. “Today, 80-90% of intercity etail orders in India are being transported by air, driven by the need for fast fulfilment, coupled with poor efficiencies of road transportation,” the Avendus report states.With increasing margin pressure and high congestion at airports, ecommerce players are likely to turn to road freight in the GST regime. While scaling, technology platforms discover granular real-time data because everything is measurable. Rivigo is differentiating with its ‘relay’ system for better truck utilisation. No single driver does more than 400 km and ceases his journey at a ‘pit stop.’ Drivers are identified based on their familiarity with a number of cities. “Earlier, duty was assigned manually (by phone). Now, there is a pit-stop app, which assigns duty for the driver automatically,” a source says. Driver loyalty gets built in because they tend to repeat transit on familiar routes and get adequate rest, as against driving the whole journey. For Rivigo, time efficiencies stem from driver knowledge.Meanwhile, fuel, speed and temperature sensors (for cold storage or pharma clients) help calculate driver performance. The consigner can track trucks and measure performance (overspeeding, idle time) while Rivigo gets data of its fleet.At 4tigo, the approach is markedly different as it is building an offline economy around online activity. It has 550 truck owners on its platform, each of which has paid a registration fee. They own 10,000 trucks between them. “Over 6,000 of these are ready for transacting,” says Anjani Mandal, 54, chief executive, 4tigo. “They pay to register and we insist on documentation. We carry out background checks of the driver, company and owners.”Another prerequisite is for 4tigo subscribers to transact electronically. “We do only electronic and online payments,” Mandal says. “To keep customers interested, 4tigo derives benefits from tieups with Indian Oil Corporation (IOC), Federal Bank, IDFC Bank and ICICI Bank. A truck driver spends more than Rs 90,000 in cash just toward fuel. The IOC partnership helps transporters get discounts, apart from availing of its 30,000 retail outlets to park their trucks. “This is support infrastructure for the driver; amenities like clean resting areas, secure parking with CCTV coverage, toilets,” says Malhotra. Drivers can withdraw cash from ATMs there. Earlier, fuel, toll and other ‘trip expenses’ were paid in advance.The IDFC Bank tie-up encourages electronic toll payment, again at special prices to transporters on the 4tigo platform. IDFC Bank is registered with the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), which is an umbrella organisation for all retail payments systems. Similarly, from June, Federal Bank helps transporters with working capital or loans based on their transaction volumes on 4tigo.Mandal says that as logistics gets organised, every stakeholder will have to adopt mobile transactions and technologies. The National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) and NPCI have envisaged a unique Radio Frequency Identification Device (RFID) embedded in trucks and mapping of the E-way Bill to the RFID prior to movement of goods. In the long term, this is expected to ease transit time.But this is easier said than done. The Karnataka government recently announced procedure on movement of goods under the E-way Bill. Suresh Nandlal Rohira, partner at accounting and consulting firm Grant Thornton India, highlighted the difficulties it posed. “While the country is still struggling with GST compliances and accordingly, dates for filing returns were extended due to system issues, Karnataka has taken the plunge to proceed with E-way Bill procedure.” Naik of Avendus agrees that GST has affected short-term activity. “A lot of SMEs and corporates are not in shape with respect to GST systems,” he explains. “But while movement of goods has been lower, this is still a short-term blip. Logistics companies and investors are bullish about what GST opens up for them.” Malhotra of 4tigo cites a couple of anecdotes that are early signs of possibilities. A transporter who regularly gets Kolkata-Mumbai consignments found transit time had come down by a day. “It would take 4-5 days and the transporter attributed it to dismantling of check-posts in Chattisgarh,” he says.His second example is the 2,100km commute between Chennai and Gurgaon. “They are doing it in 72 hours, which is an aggressive time-frame for the distance,” Malhotra adds. “They had been using a twodriver system to achieve this before and after GST.” Number of trips has gone up on this route post rollout of the tax regime. The first gain will thus be efficiencies in time and space. For Rivigo, Project Zoom potentially guarantees better truckloads from source city and destination. This is a huge change from trucks driving back empty from destinations. With ef f iciencies comes size.When Malhotra co-founded 4tigo, his 22-year old son’s friend asked him, “Aren’t you too old to start up?” For a long-truck hauling outfit, 4tigo has started out early.