How WhistleDrive transformed into an Urban Mobility Company in the COVID World

Lakshya Singh

Jan 19, 2021 — 3 min read

Do you still live your life the same as pre-covid? If you are, count that you are one of those very few lucky ones. The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the course for almost every business and startup in the country. It has made us realize the importance of “Surviving” and building sustainable models.

Here is the story of “Whistlers” as they like to call, the team of WhistleDrive, a Hyderabad based tech-enabled transportation & logistics company.

Started in 2016 by Rakesh Munnanooru, With a vision to build technology driven solutions that enable smart mobility in india. Urban Mobility consists of two movements, People and Goods. And the majority of people are office commuters, So WhistleDrive started with employee transportation and achieved the top status in less than 4 years, also their transportation management technology has also been recognized as “The Next Global Tech 50” at the World innovators meet 2019. It was THE moment where WhistleDrive is scaling spree and then COVID happened.

With Nationwide lockdowns, All the operations were put to halt, so the trip count fell to zero.

A few days went by in anticipation of things getting back to normal. The outlook on happenings across the world and based on their interactions with industry leaders, the team decided to work on things that can help WhistleDrive get through the pandemic. That’s when they took the decision to provide logistics services, (the movement of goods) transforming themselves into an Urban Mobility Company.

“We had the idea of venturing into logistics from a very long-time but we had in the roadmap of 2022 or near, COVID has left us with no choice but to work on it NOW, and challenged us to push our limits” - Rakesh Munnanooru.

WhistleDrive takes pride in solving the most complex problems in one of the highly unorganized sectors with the help of technology. With the technology integration in employee transportation, the company claims to have helped the corporates reduce their employee transportation costs up to 20% and improved the overall operations efficiency to 95%. Backed with a strong team and expertise in B2B transport operations, WhistleDrive aims to replicate the same in logistics, providing technology enabled solutions.

“The industry perceives that technology adds a lot of costs to the process and requires a highly skilled ground operations team to use it, hence the low technology adoption rate till now. But in reality, technology reduces costs, manpower and improves efficiency” says Prashanth Mamidanna, Director of Operations.

It's been just close to 6 months since they started providing logistics services, the company claims to have on boarded some of the leading brands of the country like Myntra, flipkart, Amazon, Delhivery, BigBasket and 15 others, serving in more than 11 cities in the country.

Talking about financials, WhistleDrive has raised INR 72 Crores, Series B funding in the late Q3, 2019 and claims to be operationally profitable.

WhistleDrive’s story is a classic example of how startups should act swiftly when a crisis arrives, with a proper outlook on the market.