The name ‘Oxy’ signifies logistics as the lifeline of the economy and ‘Zen’ indicates they were cutting through the noise to arrive at the optimal way. This technology based logistics service provider emulates the ‘pit-stop’ model of the passenger bus industry where a journey from point A to B involves various halts. Similarly, they too plot an optimal route to meet more orders in less time.
“In economies such as US, UK or China, top logistics players [UPS, DHL] are almost 40-50% of the size of top industrial players. But in India, the largest express logistics players are at a mere 3-4%. We wanted to change this fragmented nature of the market,” says Bala Aghoramurthy, co-founder & CEO, Oxyzen Express. “The sector needed some ‘inside out’ disruption and as people who had spent years working on the conventional systems we thought we could do it,” says Raghuraman R, co-founder and vice-chairman, Oxyzen Express.
“This results in competitive transit times and cost through best direct connectivity between source and destination,” says Raghuraman. “In just over 18 months of commencing operations, we are working on 400 customer contracts across sectors including electronics and retail. In each of these sectors, we work with the biggest names,” he adds.
The start, however, was not as easy as they make it seem today. Quitting their corporate jobs to start a business, at an age where most people look forward to retiring, the founders put in around `15 crore of their money and subsequently raised seed funds of around `35 crore from angels. Going from having large teams to attend to their needs to doing everything themselves, Oxyzen’s founders covered 10,000 pin codes — almost 50% of India — in the first one year. “We started with a ‘born national’ idea and wanted to start covering all of India right from day one,” says Aghoramurthy. Oxyzen recorded revenue of around $6 million (around `50 crore) for FY 2022-23, is now gross margin positive, and targets profitability by the fifth year of operation.
