The introduction of FASTags gave a much-needed push to India’s logistics space, poised to be worth $380 billion by 2025. Radio Frequency Identification, popularly known as RFID, tech allows vehicle owners to make toll payments directly while the vehicle is in motion.
Even as the core objective of FASTags is to make quick toll payments, Mumbai-based fintech firm 1Pay is leveraging the technology to build more use cases for fleet owners, ranging from paying for fuel, parking, challan, and more.
“We use the FASTags as a unique identification for vehicles and completely digitize the whole journey for transporters, especially the mid-sized ones,” the company co-founder Sanjiv Singh told Entrackr.
Singh further explained that while FASTags make things easy for payments at tolls, fleet owners, say with over 100 vehicles, may find it difficult to keep up with maintaining balance in all the tags for seamless transportation. With 1Pay, however, fleet owners can easily manage these payments along with additional payments like parking or fuel as mentioned above.
In addition to the payment suite, 1Pay also provides logistics and transportation management services, which include vendor payout systems, invoice collection systems, personalized bill payment, insurance, and BBPS-based bill payments.
It’s worth highlighting that 1Pay is one of the few companies to have in-principle approval from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) for becoming a payment aggregator.
Currently, 1Pay has onboarded nearly 500,000 commercial vehicles, and the company aims to increase this number to over 2 million vehicles in the next two to three years. Singh added that the company is working with 50,000 fleet owners and strives to double the number in the near future.
Founded in 2019, 1Pay has remained bootstrapped so far. The company, however, is looking to raise external funds in the next two to three months. Without disclosing exact figures, Singh said that it would be in the vicinity of $15 to $20 million.
He further said that the company made nearly Rs 28 crore in revenue in the last financial year and is looking to hit Rs 38 crore to Rs 39 crore in revenue this fiscal year.
Singh highlighted that the company has been relatively slow in terms of acquiring customers, unlike the recent trends in the market wherein startups were hyper-aggressive to onboard customers. But, “we didn’t lose customers either,” he added, reflecting upon the company’s sustenance so far.
1Pay is now hoping to expand its presence as well. To achieve this, the company plans to have more salespeople and more touch points across the country.
India’s logistics space is set to grow exponentially in the coming years. Already, there are a bunch of startups in the logistics space catering to different sub-segments. The logistics boom is also facilitating the growth of the fintech space, something which the likes of 1Pay are looking to tap into.
Source @Entrackr
