NOW Delivery explores artificial intelligence-based platform for small merchants

Representative Image

Delhi-based last mile delivery startup NOW Delivery is exploring artificial intelligence and developing a voice-based platform to help small merchants for orders. The company offers horizontal delivery solutions to hyperlocal business.

"We are using artificial intelligence and machine learning for our order allocation which means we are devising an algorithm which would match the rider with the order. Apart from that we are also developing a voice-based platform for smaller merchants. There are voice-based speakers in the market, so the idea is to create a simple voice-based platform where a person can announce an order and get captured on our platform and we later passed it on to our rider," said Vivek Pandey, founder and CEO, NOW Delivery.

The company was founded by Vivek Pandey, Bharat Khandelwal, co-founder and COO and Sahil Bhagat, CTO.

As an ex-Flipster, Vivek saw the importance of last mile delivery network built by Flipkart and extended the same reach and delivery capabilities to offline stores.

"The importance of last-mile delivery came out of Flipkart, and the same concept of supply chain management is brought to the O2O businesses like offline stores where they could get the reliable supply chain at the click of the button through NOW Delivery," he said.

The company clocked 200,000 monthly deliveries and annual revenue of over USD 1.5 million within two years.

"If you look at 2017-18, we have grown 18 times and a lot of larger partnerships kicked in. We did lot of Yum brands such as KFC, Pizza Hut and others.  There is rub off effect also, once you start doing these larger chains a lot of smaller restaurants have also come to us," said Pandey.