While moving into a new house means welcoming new opportunities, new friends and new place, it also means saying goodbye to your old place, packing all the stuff along with all the memories that you would have made at that place over a period of time. Extending an olive branch to all those moving from their old home to a new place filled with new light, opportunities, is a Bangalore based startup called Pikkol.
While there are numerous players currently operating in the extremely crowded relocation services market, there are just a handful of them who offer quality and standardised relocation services. Pikkol was born after an extensive research that recognised all the problems that consumers were facing while relocating. Started in April, 2015 in Bangalore, Pikkol wants to become a trusted name in the relocation services market. It is now fully operational in big cities like Mumbai, Pune and Delhi.
Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
In a question asked that what makes Pikkol different from its competitors like Moovo, The Porter, Instavans and other on-demand relocation services in market, Deepu Chandran, CEO & co-founder, Pikkol said, "Most online portals that claim to provide reliable packers and movers to customers do not do anything more than just passing customer leads to vendors. All the established ones and even the new portals entering this space have done just that. We at the same time work closely with the packers on improving their practices, through our robust four-stage onboarding process. They are also able to take use of strong analytics based technological backend and logistics network for servicing their orders."
"Pikkol add reliability and accountability through our operational interventions. While others just hope and pray that the jobs gets done properly, we work with the teams on the ground to ensure that it actually happens," added Deepu
The startup believes that the main customer problems like accountability, reliability and transparency which they face while availing relocation services can only be solved with technology and a unique approach of aggregation. Hence, the startup is working round the clock to create the technological, analytical and operational backbone that will have the potential to facilitate all the relocation requirements in the market.
Founders & Mentors
Pikkol was founded in 2015 by four IIM alumni - Deepu Chandran, Jayaram Kashi Visweswaran, Suraj Prakash Valimbe and Siby Mathew.
Having a lot of second time entrepreneurs on board, the Pikkol team is heavy on experience and passion. Deepu Chandran, CEO, Pikkol, had earlier also co-founded an innovation consulting firm. After the success of that firm, the IIM-Bangalore alumni decided to move on to something more scalable and co-founded Pikkol. Jayaram who is from IIM Lucknow was an entrepreneur who built a travel journal app in his earlier entrepreneurial venture. He currently looks after product architecture and operations excellence at Pikkol. Siby who worked with HP for 9 years had also experimented with hyperlocal discovery app after his computer science engineering from NIT Calicut.
Though, Pikkol founders count many as mentors, they lucky that that they have been guided by industry stalwarts such as Ajay Nanavati, (Ex-MD 3M India), Shesh Kulkarni, Founder and Ex-MD, UFM), and young entrepreneurs such as Afsal Salu (Founder - Delyver acquired by Bigbasket).
[caption id="attachment_103537" align="aligncenter" width="700"]
Pikkok team with it founders - Deepu (in center, standing), Sibyb Mathew (on knees, second from left) and Suraj Valimbe (next to Siby)[/caption]Current Status & Stats
Pikkol started off in Bangalore and is now fully operational in Mumbai, Pune and Delhi.
The less than one year old startup has netted a total of INR 1.5 Cr in the first six months of its operation. Having moved more than 3000 houses, the startup now has more than 1200 trained movers and over 300 trucks through its relocation vendors.
Funding & Future Plans
Pikkol is a bootstrapped company with 30 employees currently. In the coming months, Pikkol will be launching services in Hyderabad, Chennai and many other tier II and tier III cities.
The startup's current focus is on improving its systems and setting up the right technology and logistics to ensure 100% reliability. Meanwhile we also intend to continue our expansion to more cities in the country and also venture into international markets. Pikkol intends to reach around INR 500 Crores in revenue in the next 3-4 years.
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