Deliveries: All deliveries are delivered to your doorstep on the same day.
This article was contributed to the 'Investment at That Time (I decided to invest at that time)' section by Chosun Ilbo's reporters who know a little bit. [Nori's Yongjae Kim and Logistics Startup] At the end of 2021, I joined BASS Ventures as an investment reviewer. After working at Line and Google, I came to VC, and the types of companies I wanted to invest in the most were summarized as B2C, global, and software. Those were the areas I saw, learned, and thought about, and I had no interest or confidence in businesses that required large fixed costs or required detailed management and forecasting of economics. In particular, after six months of joining the company, the overall investment market began to freeze rapidly, and seeing existing logistics startups, large and small, struggling, I never thought that I would invest in a logistics startup. Until I met CEO Yongjae Kim. In September 2022, our bass partner, Junyeol Kang, posted a message on Slack along with a deck. “Is anyone interested in this new company founded by CEO Yongjae Kim, who founded Nori?” Base has a structure that is the opposite of other VCs, where even a representative or partner cannot directly proceed with a deal without a reviewer. If no one responds to that message within a week, it is considered dropped internally. I was familiar with the education startup called Nori, and I was drawn to the fact that the CEO was a serial entrepreneur, so I opened the deck. However, it was a logistics business. 'Why?' I couldn't have imagined that the CEO, who had experience selling education software to Daekyo, would start a new business with such a large amount of money in such difficult times, so I was quite bewildered, and that was my first thought about Deliverus. [Fast delivery of all parcels] However, the problem they were trying to solve was interesting. The domestic courier market is a huge market with sales of 8 trillion won and 4.9 billion items in terms of cargo volume, growing at a double-digit rate every year. Of this, the scale of fast delivery covered by Coupang is 20% in terms of cargo volume, and the rest uses general courier services. The plan was to provide a fast/same-day delivery solution similar to rocket delivery for the remaining 80%. All couriers as fast as Coupang? Of course it would be great. But does that make sense? If it were as easy as it sounds, why don't existing courier companies do it? I first met CEO Yongjae Kim with these questions. The general parcel collection and transportation process is composed of a combination of various agencies and terminals. There are a wide variety of interests in this process, and a lot of time and money were invested in building this system, so it is not easy for existing parcel delivery companies to change the system easily. The reason why the meme of parcels being stuck in Okcheon Hub keeps appearing (if you search on Google, there are many interesting contents) is related to this. However, the gist was that by handling only small cargo (clothing, cosmetics, books, etc.), which account for 80% of the total cargo volume, we could fill up the cargo trucks as much as possible, create efficient sorters and spaces optimized for small cargo, and create an algorithm (AI deep learning dynamic clustering) that optimizes the route based on AI based on the customer's delivery information and regional data every day, and then efficiently deliver the last mile. If we deliver in this way, we wouldn't need large and complex spaces, equipment, trucks, or processes, and since both fixed and variable costs would be low, we could match the delivery prices used by existing customers while delivering on the same day, and we could even make a profit. The CEO, whom I met for the first time, explained this to me so easily and softly that I honestly didn't find it appealing. I thought there must be a flaw in this logic, and I thought it couldn't be that easy. A few days passed like that. Deliverus' Gwangju Logistics Hub
- Stories of Bands
양형준 수석팀장