Ryde, a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform for last-mile delivery, has raised £2.5m to further expand its aim to become the world’s first fully integrated delivery management system.
The seed round was co-led by Forward Partners and Triple Point, with participation from current investors Seedcamp and Swiss Founders Fund. The raise follows a pivot from Ryde’s original platform Gameplan, which was built to service enterprise clients in the events sector.
“When Covid hit, we had to think on our feet,” said Duncan Mitchell, co-founder and CEO of Ryde. “When we explored last-mile delivery, we discovered a few interesting things.
“Firstly, the workforce was hugely disenfranchised. Secondly, businesses big and small could not meet consumer demand effectively, and lastly, there was no fit for purpose solution that allowed companies to truly take control of delivery management.
“We thought these were great problems to tackle.”
According to Ryde, it is proposing a “rider first philosophy that puts workforce wellbeing at the heart of its decision making, rethinking everything from how gig workers receive and engage with their jobs to how the internal team supports them”.
This includes better optimising their work offering so that a worker can blend scheduled and hourly shift jobs with on-demand work. As well as this, the app has been designed to help workers to map earnings and routes more effectively than their competitors.
Furthermore, the company is enabling blending workforces, which enables customers to combine internal and external delivery employees and contractors. Companies upload and self-manage their own pool of workers whilst accessing an outsourced pool of thousands across the UK as required.
“We want to unlock last-mile delivery for every business in the UK as we strongly believe hyper-localisation is the future,” said Mitchell. “That means arming small retailers to compete with the Amazons through to driving efficiency in global e-commerce businesses.”
Ryde’s current clients include Ocado, Gorillas, Dija and Slerp.
