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dunzo does more than just pick up your groceries; It will even buy you medicine at 3 AM

An Artificial Intelligence-powered app, dunzo has employed a fleet of runners on the ground to get the tasks fulfilled in time

Team dunzo

An entrepreneur’s life is so crammed that he/she doesn’t find enough time to get his/her everyday tasks done on time.

Kabeer Biswas’s story was no different. As the founder of Hoppr, a location-based check-in service that works across all mobile devices, Biswas was struggling to find some spare time to get his everyday tasks done, such as getting vegetables from the grocery store, bringing meals from the hotel, sending parcel to his friend in an another city, and repairing his faulty household electrical item.

Whenever Biswas got some free time from his busy schedule to fulfil his everyday obligations, he had to leave behind all his important tasks related to Hoppr.

Biswas realised the seriousness of this problem only after selling Hoppr to Hike, a WhatsApp-like messenger owned by Bharti SoftBank. When he talked to his friends, he realised a lot of people faced timelessness issues in their lives. While there have been many on-demand local services providers in the market, you cannot expect them to get your medicine from the medical shop at 3:00 a.m. For such companies, this is a totally different territory.

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A few months later, Biswas found himself running tasks for friends. Later, he converted this opportunity to a proper startup. And dunzo took birth.

dunzo is a mobile app to get all your tasks done. Run by Bangalore-based Dunzo Digital Pvt. Ltd., it has employed a fleet of runners on the ground to get the tasks fulfilled in time. It also has a team of operators to ensure all requests are done correctly.

“dunzo is a to-do list that completes itself. You open the app, raise a task, type in what you want to get done, and we’ll do it, typically in under an hour,” Biswas tells e27.

The startup was founded in 2015 by Biswas, Ankur Aggarwal, Dalvir Suri, and Mukund Jha. Biswas is a Computer Science Engineer with an MBA. Jha, a former Googler, along with Aggarwal, started Filter, an HR tech company before joining dunzo. Suri worked with Biswas at Hoppr prior to starting the task management venture.

The dunzo app, with its full stack approach, leverages both Artificial Intelligence and human operators in providing solutions for consumers’ everyday tasks. “We will try to get done just about anything you ask us to do in Bangalore,” Biswas says.

“This can be buying groceries, picking up your dry cleaning, finding a plumber, buying medicine at 3 in the morning, or picking up a contract from your office and sending it to your lawyer. Our fleet of runners on the ground are all independent contractors, and they are responsible for getting almost all of our tasks done,” Biswas explains.

“You can also request us for someone to clean your house, fix those broken speakers in the back of your cupboard to even get a pigeon out of your house,” he goes on.

Biswas admits that it is a daunting tasks to fulfil a request in a short time in a city like Bangalore, where road traffic is a mess and infrastructure is rickety.

“It’s very difficult! But our runners are very smart about how to shop in a variety of stores, how to navigate traffic, and how to interact with people. We have also spent a lot of time and effort building out the app for our runners to make sure they are given everything they need to be successful,” he adds.

dunzo charges the users to run their tasks, which primarily covers the cost of the runner. It charges the customer on the kilometres run — INR 45 (US$0.7) for the first 3 km and INR 15 (US$0.23) for each km after that.

“We have selected a handful of the best merchants in the city to partner with, and we receive commissions from them for the traffic we drive,” he adds.

With its 50-strong team, Dunzo does around 1,500 tasks a day. The startup is now on track to complete 100,000 tasks by August end, claims Biswas.

As of today, the app has close to 80,000 downloads to its name across iOS and Android.

In March last year, dunzo raised US$650,000 in pre-Series A round of funding from Aspada and Blume Ventures, along with a few prominent angel investors including Rajan Anandan and Sandipan Chattopadhyay.

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Biswas says that the company is now on the fundraising mode. “We are a consumer internet business, and as such are always active in the market for funds. This can be a time-consuming process, but we’ve used it to our advantage by ensuring that each time we meet with VCs we learn as much from them as possible. VCs in India tend to hire some of the best and brightest people around, people who spend their days interacting with other strong startups. They can be hubs of knowledge if you use them correct,” he says.

dunzo is operating largely in the Central Bangalore, and plans to scale to other parts of the city before going to other cities in India.

Image Credit: dunzo

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