Excited to announce new (and old) partners!
I am excited to announce that Pando has raised $2 Million seed capital, our first institutional influx, from partners we deeply trust — Nexus Venture Partners led the financing (welcome
& !), with participation from Angels and friends, (Hypertrack), (Freshdesk), and (Sirion Labs, LinkedIn)The way businesses manage their deliveries is broken; we built Pando to fix it.
Pando was built on a simple observation — while logistics is inherently networked and transactional, the systems that manage it are not. This gap results in super cumbersome processes, high risks and costs, and lost opportunities for businesses of all sizes. Digitization in silos is useless, unless it is networked — we said, and put our money where our mouths were, building Pando to solve the problem.
Pando Enterprise is the region’s first open-market digital delivery management system, that helps traditional businesses to prepare and optimize for a connected economy. It is intelligent, predictive, and scalable, and allows businesses of all sizes to control their fragmented, multi-tiered logistics exosystems through easy to use, plug and play tools.
Since going live, we have been amazed by the diversity of industries in which numerous companies see the benefits of Pando. We see clients announcing Pando at global Management Meetings, at symposiums, and Logistics Expos, with pride. Fortune500s are rolling out Pando’s Enterprise Suite for their internal users, vendors and customers; they seem to have a natural desire to start using the platform across their organisations, to monitor, control and optimise all their deliveries.
This investment is a shot in the arm for Pando to continue to reimagine logistics — from being a heavy, cumbersome cost-centre, to being a digital, efficient and robust foundation to any business. Pando — product and the team — will ease and enable commerce through digital deliveries.
We partner with people we respect, and enjoy working with.
Since we set out to build Pando, we have spent a lot of time thinking about what we would look for, in the people we work with. We naturally gravitated towards folks we enjoyed working with and trusted, but carefully picked those who loved our product and vision, will help us identify and seize big opportunities, and stay put in times of crisis. With this in mind, we slowly built a strong foundation of inspiring mentors and advisors, who invested time and effort, very early on. While some of them join this round as monetary investors, they have all played an equal role in Pando’s growth.
P Balaji (of Vodafone) stressed on the importance of going to any length, to hire talent better than ourselves. (Hell, he went that length himself, to help us.) Rajeev Ahuja (of RBL) constantly advised us on the perils of extravagance, echoing what Jaideep Prabhu had called frugal innovation, a year back, in Cambridge. Every entrepreneur needs a coach who can stay clear-headed through difficult times, and give sound advise professionally and personally — to me, that is the prescient
, a living instruction on team- and business-building. Ravi’s wisdom to always be conservative with promises and conscientious with performance came in handy. Recently, ’s resolute focus on culture posed tough, but important questions; and ’s go-big-or-go-home attitude has driven the team to rethink what we thought was possible. The sassy Lou Dela Pena’s advice to balance head and heart kept ringing useful, everyday. My father, my first and last sounding board on any issue, makes me a better (business) person everyday. These folks continue to have a deep impact on Pando in more ways than they can imagine.This commitment to carefully choosing the people we worked with held us in good stead as we assembled an all-star team (come work with us: hi@pando.in), put together this deeply committed advisory board, and now, when we chose our first investors.
We had heard about Nexus before we met them. I remember
(Nexus is an investor in HyperTrack) calling them “statesmen-like”; Rajeev spoke of them as “businessmen, more than investors”. It was no surprise that Nexus had helped build billion dollar powerhouses in India and the Valley, over the last decade — they were, and continue to be passionate entrepreneurs, themselves. built Medusind Solutions and, as a friend pointed out, helped build venture capital in India in the early 2000s. Naren founded Integrated Systems, Inc. (ISI) in the Valley, that was eventually bought by Intel, and chairs the Board of Red Hat, a company I deeply admire. Suvir built Baazee.com, that later became eBay India.So, when
reached out in the middle of a crazy week in October 2017, I was thrilled to finally meet the folks we had heard so much about. Even from the first meeting, the Nexus team deep-dived into product, pricing, and positioning — their razor-sharp focus on business-value challenged us, and continues to make Pando a better team and product, everyday. Two days after our initial meeting, sent me slide-by-slide (a lot of slides!) feedback on our deck — I was pleasantly surprised to find that he had discussed it at length with a potential client, one of the largest enterprises in India. In the weeks and months that followed, we would intuitively consult Sandeep on major decisions — he was always available, and focused on value-creation. A late-night call in November with left me feeling invigorated about the team we were building; In December, I remember texting through lunch with my father, on why per-transaction pricing was client-friendly, even for Indian enterprises.These small conversations culminated in our decision to partner with Nexus — we intuitively liked and trusted them, and loved their long-term approach towards business and team building; they loved our product, and brought into our vision. Nexus’s strong repertoire in both logistics (Delhivery, Runnr, TinyOwl) and Enterprise SaaS (Eka, Druva etc) was a definite plus. Sandeep brings wisdom from his decade-long experience backing Indian entrepreneurs with global ambitions, and clarity of judgement to our conversations; candor and trust, integral to the team we are building; and the calm of a person who has seen category defining businesses from start-up to scale-up. Puneet’s constant support and enthusiasm in helping us build a strong team has already started seeing benefits.
, the team and I are fortunate to have their guidance and direction in our journey, and commit to putting their experience, and this capital to good use, to ease and enable commerce, through digital deliveries.We are hiring! Check us out at: www.pando.in | Write to us at: hi@pando.in
