Homegrown venture lending fund Stride Ventures has invested Rs 20 crore in Wiz Freight, which is a full-stack digital freight forwarder offering door-to-door international freight solutions to importers and exporters, the company announced on January 13.
With this, Stride Ventures has become the first venture-debt lender to the tech-enabled freight forwarding company headquartered in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. The total commitments of the venture debt fund, which provides tailor-made credit solutions to startups, have now crossed Rs 1000 crores in portfolio companies across both its debt funds.
Commenting on the funding, Ishpreet Singh Gandhi, Founder, Stride Ventures, said: “Wiz Freight has been successful in growing consistently and onboarding key corporates while sustaining margins in a highly volatile freight market. In spite of the pandemic affecting the wider freight and logistics industry, large-scale digitisation has led to newer solutions. With Wiz, we are very keen and excited to be a part of their journey towards expanding global reach and creating disruptions in the international supply chain.”
Speaking about the prospects of the company, Wiz Freight Co-founder Ramkumar Govindarajan said: “Cross-border shipping has been the backbone of global trade and the last two years have seen unprecedented disruptions in the international supply chain driving prices and inventory shortages. We have been able to help our customers minimise disruptions with better visibility, planning, and real-time shipment control using our tech platform.”
He added: “We have grown 25x in the last 12 months and have established a presence across 10 Indian cities. We are planning to invest in hiring, tech development, and global expansion in 2022. We are happy to partner with Stride Ventures in this journey.”
Notably, digital supply chain solutions such as Wiz Freight – which offer end-to-end shipment management solutions including price discovery, booking management, shipment tracking, customer support, etc -- are becoming increasingly important in the modern-day shipment industry.
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