What is Kargo? Kargo Review, Features

Kargo is an on-demand inter-city B2B logistics startup headquartered in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia.

About Kargo

Kargo currently provides services in Sumatra, Java and Bali, Indonesia. They mainly focus on the corporate market and have no plans to enter the retail market. Kargo provides customers with an online management platform that allows them to track the progress of freight and provide more reliable and cost-effective services. At the same time, Kargo also provides customers with many value-added services, including truck booking, process tracking, cargo insurance, order payment, and supplier management.

About the Founder

Tiger Fang, the founder of Kargo, was GM of Uber in western China and Indonesia, helping Uber to establish its business in Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. He was also a member of the founding management team of Lazada Thailand and Vietnam.

The company's co-founder and CTO Yodi Aditya has experience in building platform solutions in logistics, aviation, and finance.

Some other members of the team include former Uber employees and technical experts from Indonesian online platforms.

Platform positioning

Kargo is currently positioned as a logistics matching platform. Specifically, Kargo has an order pool from shippers and third-party logistics companies upstream, and forms its own capacity pool by gathering small and medium-sized truck companies downstream, matching transactions by matching demand and capacity. In terms of choosing three different models, namely pricing, bidding, or letting shippers and truck companies coordinate on their own, Kargo is still exploring the most suitable method for Indonesia.

Platform Capacity

In terms of transportation capacity, Tiger observed that Indonesia's current truck capacity is quite dispersed. The top ten truck companies are far from monopolizing the market, and a large amount of transportation capacity is in the hands of small and medium-sized truck companies. In the case of a dispersed market, both shippers and truck companies need to match and manage transportation capacity through multiple channels, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive. This is why the market needs companies like Kargo to use a platform approach to match dispersed transportation capacity. At the same time, the more dispersed the market is, the stronger the bargaining power of the intermediate platform.

Of course, the fragmentation of the market means that bringing these transport capacities to the platform requires strong offline BD capabilities. Kargo's advantage in this regard comes from the founder's previous work experience.

Financing

-In June 2016, Kargo announced that it had received a seed round of financing. The specific amount was not disclosed. The investors in this round of financing were East Ventures and angel investor Diono Nurjadin.

-In March 2019, Kargo received a seed round of financing of US$7.6 million led by Sequoia India.