[Funding alert] Rockstud, Artha Ventures invest $1.1M in Everest Fleet

Rockstud Capital Investment Fund (RCIF) made its debut investment in Everest Fleet Pvt Ltd, a B2B fleet management service provider, after screening over 200 deals in the last one year.

RCIF, a sector-agnostic fund with focus on pre-Series A stage of funding, along with Artha Venture Fund-I and a few angel investors, together invested $1.1 million in Everest Fleet. The fund raised by the fleet management firm would be used predominantly for increasing the fleet size and hiring drivers as well as for working capital.

Founded by seasoned angel investor Siddharth Ladsariya in October 2016, Everest has been successful in addressing one of the major issues faced by the cab aggregators. This includes scaling, utilising assets efficiently, managing drivers and overall operations. The company is looking to expand to more than 500 cabs in the next one year and may also include electric vehicles in its fleet.

In a press statement, Abhishek Agarwal, Partner of RCIF, said

“There is a huge demand supply mismatch when it comes to availability and supply of cabs. In Mumbai itself, there is a shortfall of 35,000 cars. We feel Everest is well positioned to address this gap and become the largest fleet management service provider in Mumbai to begin with and then expand to other cities. Also, RCIF believes in creating social impact through its investment. In this case, the company would be creating significant job opportunities by recruiting 1,000 drivers for 500 cars (in Mumbai) as it runs in shift."

Everest, one of the largest fleet management service providers to cab aggregators like Uber and Ola in Mumbai, has recently started operations in Bengaluru. The cabs provided by the company run on two shifts every day, thus ensuring optimum utilization of asset and lowest downtime.

(Editing by Suman Singh)

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