GoPaani, based in Indore, has raised $600,000 in seed funding from 3one4 Capital, PointOne Capital, and a slew of angel investors, including Dunzo co-founder Mukund Jha.
GoPaani is a one-stop solution for every daily water service provider to manage their business in a hassle-free manner, founded by Ankit Ranka and Arpit Sharda. GoPaani aspires to offer a whole app-based solution for India’s daily delivery enterprises. This program allows businesses to keep track of goods inventories from dispatch to delivery, pickup, and unloading, starting with water jar suppliers.
Employees of these companies use their app login to make delivery entries, and the company admin can track and generate real-time information on the work of the employees. Customers can also keep track of a delivery, pay bills, rate deliveries, request extra products, and message business owners, which increases transparency and improves the customer experience.
Six Columbia University alumni, including Rohit Gupta (CEO, Dream Game Studios), Sharath Gururaj (India Head, Cermati.com), Devendra Laulkar (Co-founder, Avoma), and others, as well as Satish Thakur (AVP, Swiggy) and two US-based investors, Dan Clay Ellis (Founder, RallyTeam) and Kaushal Lahankar, are among the angel investors (Head of Machine Learning, S&P Global).
Ankit Ranka said in a statement that “We started GoPaani to solve the problems faced by over 1.2 million water delivery businesses in India like product loss, billing issues, poor customer service. We have seen adoption with other delivery businesses facing similar problems like milk and tiffin delivery. With GoPaani already present in 15 states across India and 8 different languages, we plan to focus on water delivery businesses and build the product for a wider set of delivery businesses starting next year.”
Despite the fact that more Indians are using digital technologies, many small companies and sellers remain offline. These enterprises often operate within a 5-8-kilometer radius and compute inventory and sales using traditional methods such as paper ledgers, which are both time-consuming and prone to lose.
GoPaani is attempting to change this by providing a suite of technologies to help small businesses digitize their journals and manage their finances and workforce.
Arpit Sharda said in a statement, “Before GoPaani, I was into plastic sourcing, manufacturing, and trading. I saw the pain points of delivery businesses such as water, and milk suppliers very closely and every now and then got requests for technical help from these businesses. When I discussed this with Ankit, we decided to launch a digital representation of the daily sheets that these businesses carry – that was the starting point for us. From there on, we kept on building what our customers needed.”
According to studies, India has approximately 20 million daily delivery businesses, including those that provide water, milk, vegetables, newspapers, gas cylinders, tiffin, laundry, catering, and B2B delivery. It’s a $2.3 billion a year market in terms of software subscriptions.
GoPaani has so far begun with its initial network of water supplier contacts in central India and has used existing web listings to expand its network across the country. They’ve also connected with water suppliers from all around the world by joining their WhatsApp groups, which has allowed them to contact a large number of clients at once.