Personal task management startup dunzo raises $650K funding from Blume Ventures and Aspada

Bengaluru-based dunzo - a daily tasks management app, announced that it had raised a $650,000 pre-Series A round of funding from Aspada and Blume Ventures, along with a few prominent angel investors including Rajan Anandan and Sandipan Chattopadhyay. With a full stack approach, dunzo leverages Artificial Intelligence(AI) and human operators in providing solutions for consumers’ everyday tasks.

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Story so far

dunzo was founded by Ankur Aggarwal, Dalvir Suri, Mukund Jha and Kabeer Biswas in 2015 with an aim to solve the deep local discovery and fulfillment problem. With a chat based interface, dunzo allows individuals to create 'To do lists' and collaborate with partners(vendors) to strike off the tasks from the list. dunzo consists of a 19 member team that mainly consists of techies.

dunzo currently focusses on four main categories- shipping packages from point to point, buying, repairing stuff and home services. With their 24x7 service, dunzo claims that they have encountered diverse use cases so far including requests to repair clocks, buy laptops and other gifts, getting shattered phone screens replaced within hours of a flight and getting pigeons out of a balcony. dunzo takes a commission(a percentage of the amount) for each transaction or task that they help the user complete through their platform from different service providers.

With a consumer first approach, dunzo believes that by focusing on user needs they can own the whole stack in getting their tasks completed. The team claims that dunzo has scaled rapidly since its launch last year to a monthly run rate of 10,000 transactions. Kabeer said, “The tech platform is self-learning and gets more powerful with every task.”

Karthik Reddy, Managing Partner of Blume Ventures believes that dunzo is a convergence of mobile concierge, chat based commerce and merchant discovery and fulfillment. Sahil Kini, Principal, Aspada expects the dunzo model to deliver both a distinctive customer experience and significant income improvements to small service providers by creating linkages to larger and more formal markets.

Sector overview

Mobile concierge and chat based commerce has seen a lot of interest globally as well as in India. Facebook's virtual assistant for Messenger 'M' is an interesting player in this space. Relying on both manual intervention and AI, M helps users with tasks they aim to do. Facebook's long term goal is to make Messenger a stickier platform and get users to shop and make purchases through it. Y Combinator backed Magic and UK based Dispatch.pm are other interesting players in the on-demand task management space.

Zirtual is targeted at professionals and unlike the above on demand public services, Zirtual provides startups and large enterprises a dedicated virtual assistant for a monthly subscription fee. In India, GetMyPeon provides errand-running and same-day delivery service in Mumbai. The startup raised $250k in seed funding in 2015.

dunzo has so far focussed only on Bengaluru and aims to strengthen its grip of operations here before venturing out to more cities. The startup is going after a big sector with a lot of variables and they will need experienced personnel on the ground to scale up and meet peak hour demands. It will also be interesting to see what dunzo focusses on in the future and how they improve and further enhance their full stack approach to cater to different complex problems and user requests.

You can download dunzo here for Android and iOS.