[Funding alert] Locus raises $50M Series C funding led by GIC

Logistics startup Locus raised $50 million in Series C funding led by GIC, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, with participation from Qualcomm Ventures LLC and existing investors Tiger Global and Falcon Edge.

Angel investors Amrish Rau, CEO of Pine Labs; Kunal Shah, CEO of CRED; Raju Reddy, Founder of Sierra Atlantic; and Deb Deep Sengupta, former President and MD, SAP South Asia, also participated in the round. 

The startup will use the funding to improve its geographical reach and build its research and development team to expand the product line. Locus had earlier raised $30 million across multiple rounds.

CEO Nishith Rastogi said, “Quality and patient capital allows us to focus on path-breaking R&D, helping us deliver exceptional long-term value to our customers, over incremental improvements. We will be recruiting more PhDs in our data science team and are looking to double our patents by 2022."

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Varsha Tagare, Sr. Director, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., and Managing Director at Qualcomm Ventures, said, “We’re excited to invest in Locus to enable logistics as a service and support their journey to become a global last-mile automation leader."

Founded in 2015, Locus uses ML and proprietary algorithms to offer smart supply chain solutions to customers. With clients across North America, Southeast Asia, Europe, and the Indian subcontinent, the startup has offices in the US, the UK, India, Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Germany. 

It is also expanding across the US, hiring industry veterans like Walter Heil, Senior Vice President, Business; and Michael D. Parmett, Vice President, Customer Success to run the US business. Heil previously worked at Project44 and BluJay, while Parmett was a part of 3GTMS and Manhattan Associates.   

“We are now looking to support our customers with a global footprint. Other than the geographies we are already present in, we are also investing heavily in Latin America and aggressively building our presence there,” added Nishanth.

Locus claims that its scalable solutions have resulted in $150 million savings in logistics costs, 70 million+ kilometre reductions in distance travelled, and 17 million+ kilograms reduction in GHG emissions for clients across sectors like ecommerce, retail, e-grocery, CPG/FMCG, home services, home deliveries, 3PL, transportation, and B2B distribution.