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CNBC International
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He Knew Nothing About Trucking. Now 75,000 Trucks Run on His Platform
He Knew Nothing About Trucking. Now 75,000 Trucks Run on His Platform
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0:00
I think if I knew how complex was trucking,
0:01
I think I would have thought again. So, the unknown was very helpful.
0:06
Gaurav Biswas thought he had landed on a simple idea - Uber,
0:11
but for trucks. There was just one problem. He had never moved a truck in his life. Then
0:17
one day at dinner with friends, he saw a problem he had never thought much about.
0:22
He was constantly having to walk out of the restaurant. We could
0:25
see that he was arguing or shouting with somebody.
0:27
I said, "Hey is everything OK?"
0:28
He said, “Oh I have seven containers that have to go on the same vessel tomorrow".
0:31
And I said, “You should have an Uber of trucks.”
0:34
That idea became TruKKer: a digital freight platform that connects companies
0:39
that need to move cargo with the truck owners and transporters that carry it.
0:44
TruKKer is the largest digital freight network across the GCC, Turkey, and South Asia.
0:49
Across the Gulf, much of trucking is still fragmented. small truck owners,
0:54
phone calls, paperwork, brokers, and long waits for payment.
0:58
Trucking is extremely important as a sector because whatever you touch and feel, consume,
1:03
it's all touched a truck. Whether it's a seaport or an airport or a factory,
1:07
everything that we consume moves. Trucking is that connector.
1:11
There are three numbers to look out for in TruKKer's story.
1:14
48 hours - How long Gaurav says it took for him to decide to take on the trucking industry.
1:21
75,000 plus - the number of trucks now connected across TruKKer's network
1:27
And up to 300 million US dollars - the financing facility TruKKer secured in
1:33
2026 from Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank, as the company pushes toward its next stage of growth.
1:41
This is Founder Effect. My name is Gaurav Biswas. I'm the founder and CEO of TruKKer.
1:48
Before TruKKer, Gaurav was an outsider to logistics, but not to complex infrastructure.
1:55
He grew up in a third-generation business family in India, trained as a structural engineer,
2:01
and became one of the youngest directors at global engineering firm, AECOM.
2:06
After the dinner that sparked his "Uber for trucks" idea,
2:09
he went home and started researching the industry.
2:12
Two days of googling told me that the trucking sector is one of the
2:16
largest sectors in any economy. So, you take agriculture, construction,
2:19
trucking. It is significantly unorganized and unsophisticated.
2:23
He decided to go for it. What made that quick turnaround possible was his co-founder
2:29
childhood friend, Pradeep Mallavarapu, who already ran a software company.
2:34
I didn't want to wait to then hire engineers and then Pradeep brought 17 people on day one.
2:39
This dinner was October, mid-October, beginning of December we had an MVP.
2:44
But TruKKer didn't start in the Gulf. It started in India in late 2015,
2:50
and the first version struggled with the two founders funding the early build themselves.
2:55
Between the two of us, I was funding the cash, and he was funding the people. We
2:59
got more than half a million dollars from our own bank of mom and dad and your own money.
3:03
In India, we spent money in distributing 3,000 smartphones,
3:06
you know, from our own funds because we thought the driver will adopt if he has a smartphone,
3:10
in 2016, not every driver had a smartphone.
3:12
But they had an even bigger problem at hand.
3:16
India's freight market was too sprawling for the young company. Customers did not want one,
3:21
clean long-haul route. They wanted trucks moving from one city to many destinations,
3:27
across both short and long distances.
3:30
To make that work, TruKKer needed a denser network and much more capital than it had.
3:36
In India, you can go anywhere to anywhere. And when you go to a company, they don't
3:39
want to just give you trucks to Bombay. They say, hey, I want my trucks to Surat also,
3:43
and also to the destination which is 500 kilometers away, and not 2000 kilometers
3:47
away. So, that caused us to create a network, and that scale required a lot of investment.
3:52
So, in 2016 the founders made the hard call. They paused operations in India in July,
3:58
and by October they had relaunched in the UAE,
4:01
a market whose long-haul routes better matched what they were trying to build.
4:06
When we realized that oh no, we need to make something simpler. Let's try and raise smaller
4:10
and build something and prove it to ourselves. So, if you look at Oman, say Muscat to Jeddah,
4:15
you know, you pretty much connect in a linear line all the main human hubs and industrial hubs. So,
4:19
like, okay, let's do long-haul trucking in this linear line. And that worked, and we raised money.
4:25
Walking away from India taught Gaurav the lesson he repeats most.
4:29
As founders, and especially in tech products where you have to
4:31
obviously have something solving better and faster, you must not get emotionally,
4:36
you know, attached to a solution that you think is a great solution.
4:39
Restarting in the UAE meant trying to raise outside money and convincing investors that
4:44
TruKKer could win in a market where others had already attracted far more capital.
4:50
There was another Indian startup and they're very successful listed in India called BlackBuck. They
4:54
had raised a $100 million Series A, and most investors that would decline us would say,
4:59
"Oh, why would you be successful? Somebody else is solving the same
5:02
problem and has been funded $100 million." And you would not have an easy answer to that one.
5:07
The first outside believer came after a startup competition in Bahrain in 2017.
5:12
Ali Saleem, the first angel or non-family friend,
5:17
called me after we had won second prize in the MIT Arab competition in Bahrain,
5:24
and he wanted to know more about the business and then he gave us a $200,000 cheque.
5:27
And more capital followed. TruKKer’s backers came to include some of the region’s biggest
5:32
names — Abu Dhabi’s ADQ and Mubadala, Saudi Arabia’s STV, and Bahrain’s Investcorp.
5:40
Then in 2026, TruKKer secured up to $300 million in financing from Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank,
5:47
backed by customer receivables — the money it expects to collect
5:50
from shippers across its freight network.
5:53
Early on in his journey, Gaurav rode along
5:56
in a truck to better understand the people he was building for.
5:59
I went on a truck from Porbandar to Delhi when we started in India,
6:03
just to know his life, and they have a hard life. It's one of the hardest professions in
6:07
the world. Imagine you don't sleep at home for days and months, and sometimes in years.
6:12
In the summer, you don't make enough money to actually keep your air conditioning on. So,
6:16
you actually go below the trailer while you're parked because it's at least a
6:19
shaded place. And while you're sleeping, you're still a security for your cargo,
6:24
because if somebody nicks something out of it, you are responsible.
6:27
Gaurav says one of the biggest pain points for drivers and small transporters was payment.
6:32
Not just whether they would get paid but when, and whether the price would change after the job.
6:38
Their trust is primarily on you promising and delivering. They have brokers who would pay them,
6:44
"listen today I don't have the money. Do the second trip, I'll pay you for both together."
6:48
And this happens, this is a real problem in that sector, so for us that payment is the
6:52
main trigger which gives you the trust. You work with TruKKer you always get paid. And
6:56
you get paid what you were told when you were taking the cargo, not as a second negotiation.
7:01
That promise became central to TruKKer's supply network. If carriers trusted the platform,
7:06
the company could bring more trucks into the system and expand into new routes and regions.
7:12
UAE, Saudi Arabia is our home ground. We move cargo across the GCC into Levant,
7:18
North Africa, Turkey, Kazakhstan, and the CIS part of the world.
7:21
We remain focused on long-haul because it's a mega sector.
7:25
So, how does it actually work? At its simplest, TruKKer is a matchmaker, connecting companies
7:31
that need to move goods, with the truck owners and transporters that can carry them.
7:36
But each match is far more complicated than calling a ride.
7:40
There were 30 to 70 different factors that involve the matchmaking of a demand and a supply. In Uber,
7:45
you and the driver are the two decision makers. And here, there are 15 plus other people,
7:50
stakeholders, who influence that decision. You pay 100 dirhams for a cab transaction,
7:55
and you pay thousands of dollars for a trucking transaction.
7:57
So, it's "Uber of trucks", it's not Uber at all.
7:59
Gaurav has learned that technology can only take the company so far.
8:04
We scaled into a certain country which we did not have the core competence of understanding
8:09
the country, or we did not have the right people from day one who just went from technology.
8:14
While we knew that our business is not Uber, you can't just make another city live,
8:18
forget about making another country live without doing custom work.
8:23
And we did that, and then we got out in six months.
8:25
He says that mistake cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars.
8:29
I constantly make mistakes. I think it's very
8:31
important. I think if you're not making mistakes then you are not trying things.
8:36
Dad used to always say that in business don't get overeducated. He says,
8:39
hey listen beyond a certain point analysis is going to tell you everything not to do,
8:44
and you will be overeducated to never be able to take a risk.
8:47
Trucking usually only becomes visible when something goes wrong. For Gaurav, one test came
8:53
during disruption around the Strait of Hormuz, one of the world's most important trade choke points.
8:59
The company's ability to be the infrastructure,
9:01
I think has become quite evident during the Strait of Hormuz crisis.
9:05
You know we have markets and lanes which have scaled from you know 10 to 500 you know,
9:12
overnight, and those are things that you can't do without having that
9:16
strong technology layer allowing that scale up.
9:18
For Gaurav, it proved a bigger point. Trucking is not just everyday
9:22
logistics. In moments of disruption, it becomes strategic infrastructure.
9:27
I feel GCC has an unfair issue. We are the highest traffic through this route
9:33
where somebody else controls the traffic light. This one is showing
9:36
that how trucking is so important to have these alternate things in place.
9:40
And because the market is still so fragmented, he thinks the opportunity is barely tapped.
9:46
We are the largest operator in the region by number of transactions and revenues and all of
9:50
that, bigger than the biggest fleet companies, but we have less than 1% market share. So, you know,
9:55
the problem is too big. More people are welcome to solve it.
9:59
The company has discussed a possible IPO path, but Gaurav frames that as just one possible milestone.
10:05
Personally, I don't care whether we are a public company or a private company,
10:09
as long as we can keep making that impact.
10:12
After a decade in a sector he once thought could be solved like ride hailing,
10:16
Gaurav is careful not to make entrepreneurship sound clean or easy. The first idea was simple.
10:23
executing on it was much more complex. But for Gaurav, the lesson is still to try.
10:29
My mom, she would always reward me for trying something. She always
10:33
would say that it's better to be somebody who always does something,
10:36
than somebody who's waiting to be told what to do. So yes, just make an attempt.
