API plus AI helps speed up last mile logistics

Bringing products and services from A to B, that’s what logistics is all about. Being able to track, manage and plan logistics in a simple programmatic approach is no trivial task. The holy grail of logistics is to simplify what is called ‘last mile logistics’, the way the end product or service actually gets to the end user.

A pain point for many developers building on-demand applications and services is connecting the logistics piece, especially the location and mapping capabilities. Bills itself as “the world’s largest community of logistics tech builders,” a startup called HyperTrack strives to provide the building block APIs (application programming interfaces) for logistics, so developers can focus on what is at the core of their business and not worry about the infrastructure layer.

HyperTrack’s platform provides logistics developers with a simple API to connect and access complex logistics workflows. The platform is also supported by an enhanced artificial intelligence (AI) machine learning model that helps to optimize logistics.

“HyperTrack is a logistics API. It’s like Twillio, but for logistics,” Kashyap Deorah, founder and CEO of HyperTrack, told VentureBeat. “The reason the world needs a logistics API is the complexity of last-mile logistics, as the world is moving, people are pushing a button and things are moving to bring products and services to them. “

In an effort to expand its technology and go-to-market efforts, HyperTrack announced today that it has raised $25 million in a Series A funding round led by WestBridge Capital and existing investor Nexus Venture Partners.

HyperTrack fits into the supply chain management market, which is estimated to be: Markets and Markets to generate $28.9 billion by 2022, growing to $45.2 billion by 2027.

HyperTrack’s API tackles the complexity of last-mile logistics

In the on-demand economy, last-mile logistics typically involves developers stitching together multiple systems.

Deorah explained that, for example, in a modern app for a delivery service, once an order has been accepted, the company has to do the route planning, assign orders for delivery and track the entire process.

“One of the most important components of any logistics stack is that you have a brain in the system that figures out who is doing what and then the driver receives the shipment,” Deorah said.

Even more complexity is added by the myriad data and location tracking systems an organization uses, as well as the different data access approaches developers must adopt across both Android and iOS mobile operating systems.

“So to do something as simple as determining how much distance a driver travels is tantamount to merging mobile cloud and mapping technologies,” Deorah said. “That’s the part where we say it should be as simple as writing a SQL query or calling an API.”

How Reinforcement Learning Improves Last Mile Logistics

AI is an important part of the HyperTrack platform and helps improve the accuracy and optimization of the logistics workflow.

With every fulfillment in the last mile, Deorah said the key features are the actual customer fulfillment address, the amount of time it takes to get to the address, and the most efficient route to get to the location. That’s one of the places HyperTrack is leveraging AI, using data from its platform for reinforcement learning.

“With every order, we derive the correct customer address, service time and route and feed that back into better planning and allocation,” Deorah said. “So each order makes the quality of the next order fulfillment better.”