FoundrPwr - Building, Pivoting & Scaling Platform Businesses
In 2015, only 7% of India's truck drivers had smartphones. The industry ran entirely on phone calls and personal relationships. Building a tech platform seemed nearly impossible.
Rajesh Yabaji and his co-founders built BlackBuck anyway.
Today, BlackBuck connects 1.2 million trucks and 700,000+ truckers, processes 15 million monthly transactions, serves companies like Hindustan Unilever and Coca-Cola, and successfully went public in 2024.
Mela Ventures is delighted to host Rajesh Yabaji for a FoundrPwr conversation where he'll share his experiences building BlackBuck - From the early days of low smartphone penetration, through strategic pivots, navigating COVID, and expanding into complementary products like fintech and insurance.
Join us for an honest conversation about what it takes to build in India's toughest markets.
Topics We'll Cover
🚚 Building for Bharath Rajesh will share his experiences creating a platform for users with limited digital literacy and means.
🤝 Building Trust in Traditional Industries How BlackBuck established credibility in a fragmented, relationship-driven market, earning trust from both truckers, SMEs, and enterprise customers.
🔄 Strategic Pivots Lessons from BlackBuck's evolution, business experiments, and how Rajesh approached major business model changes while maintaining momentum.
📦 Expanding the Product When and how BlackBuck moved beyond load matching to add fintech, insurance, telematics, and FASTag payments and the considerations around product expansion.
About Rajesh Yabaji
Rajesh Yabaji is the Co-Founder and CEO of BlackBuck (Zinka Logistics Solutions), which went public in November 2024. An IIT Kharagpur alumnus with an MBA, Rajesh worked in ITC's Supply Chain division before co-founding BlackBuck in 2015 with Chanakya Hridaya and Ramasubramaniam B.
Who Should Attend?
This is a founder-to-founder discussion; candid, practical, and focused on the real experiences of building a company from scratch to public markets.
This event is for founders and senior leaders, particularly those:
Working on transforming entire industries
Scaling operations and technology
Building for non-metro users
Thinking about business model changes or product expansion