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Point Pickup Technologies, an American digital B2B courier platform, fully developed by a team of Romanian programmers, has received a $ 30 million grant from Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. (BBH), one of the oldest and largest private banks in the United States.
The funding will be used to develop and improve technology and services, helping the company meet growing and diversified demand. Point Pickup has grown sixfold in the past few months and the outlook is extremely optimistic as the online delivery market grows exponentially and Point Pickup is one of the few platforms of its kind to offer large-scale services, platform representatives say.
The idea of developing Point Pickup appeared in 2015 in the United States, the company founded by Radu Florescu and Tom Fiorita. The startup initially positioned itself as a delivery service in the B2C segment.
Once registered on the application, individual users could deliver a package as soon as possible, with the help of one of the drivers registered on the platform. Three years later, the platform attracted strong interest from companies, which led the company to quickly move to the B2B model.
The challenge of providing courier services to large retailers and chain stores in the United States has taken the platform to a new level of growth, at a time when a new team, 100% Romanian, took over the technology and product development.
The core team, which designed the project as a whole, was Andrei Popa, head of development within Cheil’s digital division | Centrade and Mircea Alexandrescu, Director of Product. Subsequently, Andrei Popescu, Head of Infrastructure, and Giovani Sîrbu, Lead Developer, joined and eventually the team grew to 15 people.
In a short time, the platform expanded its business in all 50 US states, integrating the first large customers, respectively, Fortune 500 companies such as retail chains Walmart, Target, Albertsons or Kroger.
“I believe that the success of the platform and the satisfaction of the companies we work with reflect our proactive and flexible way of working,” says Andrei Popa. “The retail giants change the rules overnight to respond to any market movement and remain competitive. Therefore, the technology you develop to provide services to these companies must be one step ahead of the unpredictable. You can’t. allow you to develop a function that strictly meets specific requirements. It is necessary to anticipate and consider a whole range of possible directions and scenarios. And I think this is one of the specific strengths of Romanian IT professionals. We don’t just limit ourselves to the discipline of execution, of the code, but we also develop a discipline in vision. Or, if at the end of 2019 I said that we went through two years of continuous challenges, the beginning of the pandemic has totally changed the definition of challenge for all of us “.
In recent months, the US home delivery market (from shop to home) exploded, with some segments reporting volumes up to three times higher overnight, requiring “on the go” optimizations at the systems, process and data reporting levels. The context has led to changes in delivery procedures and customer behavior, the emergence of new rules and, above all, restrictions. All of these changes had to be integrated in record time into the Point Pickup platform and applications.
“The COVID-19 experience has also contributed to how we will focus our growth strategy after this investment round,” continues Andrei Popa. “We aim to have more dynamic resources (both team and technology) that can be reallocated to respond quickly to changes in crisis scenarios. The cloud infrastructure is also undergoing a number of updates, for example, to move to Artificial Intelligence for IT operations (AIOps), to optimize the experience-based autoscaling algorithms and growth model to which 2020. But the main directions for the next post-funding period are the expansion of data-driven components (based on data) and the area of predictive analysis (predictive analysis), the development of automations focused on improving performance and customer satisfaction, as well as an important update in the area of user experience (User experience). We also plan to soon take the first steps towards integration with suppliers of autonomous delivery vehicles ”.
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