Startup Deep Dive : Locus.sh — the women’s safety app that IKEA’s owner bought to run deliveries

Locus optimises more than 1.5 billion deliveries across 30-plus countries, and yet the Indian company that files its accounts in Bengaluru booked a 32.0% fall in revenue the year before a global retailer bought it outright. In October 2025, Ingka Investments — the investment arm of the largest IKEA franchisee — acquired 100% of Locus, a startup that began in 2015 not in logistics at all, but as a women’s safety app called RideSafe.

That is the shape of the Locus story: a route-deviation engine built to protect a founder’s sister on a late-night cab ride, repurposed into an artificial-intelligence dispatch platform, sold to the owner of a furniture giant that wanted to stop paying software rent to a vendor and instead own the vendor. Nishith Rastogi, the founder and chief executive, framed the deal in his own words: it “preserves our independence and ensures our perpetuity” (company statement, October 2025). Below is how a safety app for carpoolers became infrastructure for moving sofas.

Quick facts

What Locus does

Locus sells software that decides how goods move on the last mile and every mile before it. Its customers are enterprises — retailers, e-grocers, consumer-goods makers and third-party logistics firms — that run large delivery fleets and want fewer kilometres, fuller trucks and tighter delivery windows without hiring an army of planners.

• Core product: an order-to-delivery dispatch management and transportation management system (TMS) that plans routes, sequences stops and allocates orders to vehicles and riders.
• Positioning as of September 2026: the company describes itself as “the world’s first agentic Transportation Management System,” with AI agents making dispatch decisions constrained by more than 250 operational rules (company website).
• Company-stated scale: 1.5 billion-plus deliveries optimised, 12 million-plus automated decisions a day, 360-plus enterprise customers across 30-plus countries, and 99.97% platform uptime (Locus website, September 2026).
• Named customers over time include Unilever, Nestlé, Mondelēz, BigBasket, Blue Dart, Tata Group and Bukalapak (company Series C release, June 2021).

The origin: a safety app, not a logistics one

The founding insight had nothing to do with trucks. In December 2014, after the widely reported Delhi cab-assault case and a late-night airport ride taken by Rastogi’s sister, Nishith Rastogi and Geet Garg built RideSafe — a women’s safety app that tracked whether a cab strayed from its expected route. Both founders were ex-Amazon: Rastogi had worked on fraud-detection systems and studied at BITS Pilani; Garg had built machine-learning and risk systems on AWS and studied computer science at IIT Kharagpur.

The engine underneath RideSafe was the interesting part. It could detect a deviation in real time without a pre-set route — the founders called it R2D2, for real-time route-deviation detection. Then something unplanned happened: food-delivery companies started using RideSafe to watch their own delivery staff. Watching those fleets, the founders saw a bigger, duller, more valuable problem than safety — nobody had a good decision-making layer for dispatch. That observation, not a business plan, is what became Locus in 2015.

The struggle years: pivots and near-misses

Locus is a story of two hard pivots and a long climb against incumbents that were far bigger and better funded.

• Pivot one, 2015: abandoning a live consumer safety app with real users to chase an unproven B2B logistics idea. The safety product had traction; the logistics product had a hunch. The founders killed the thing that worked.
• Early funding was thin: the first institutional cheque was a $2.75 million Series A in May 2016 led by Exfinity Venture Partners — modest capital for a deep-tech optimisation problem that needed data-science PhDs.
• Pivot two, model and geography: Locus moved from selling in India to selling to global enterprises, shifting its centre of gravity to the United States (the parent is Delaware-registered Mara Labs, Inc.) while keeping engineering in Bengaluru. Competing against established TMS vendors and in-house teams at large logistics firms meant long enterprise sales cycles.
• The revenue wobble: the Indian filing entity’s revenue did not climb smoothly. Operating revenue fell from ₹97.0 crore in FY23 to ₹66.0 crore in FY24 — a 32.0% drop (Inc42) — even as global delivery volumes on the platform kept rising, a gap discussed in the segment section below.

The turning point: bought by IKEA’s owner

On 7 October 2025, Ingka Investments — the investment arm of Ingka Group, the largest IKEA franchisee — announced it had acquired 100% of Locus. IKEA had first been a Locus customer; the acquisition turned a vendor relationship into ownership. The logic was blunt. Tolga Öncü, Head of IKEA Retail at Ingka Group, said the point was “taking control of a crucial element in our fulfilment chain” (company statement, October 2025).

• The deal: Ingka Investments bought all of Locus; the price was not disclosed by either side.
• Independence: Locus continues to operate as a standalone subsidiary, keeping its brand, its leadership under Rastogi and its non-IKEA client base — a structure both sides stressed publicly.
• The prize: trade press reported an expected reduction of about €100 million a year in IKEA’s global delivery costs from bringing the technology in-house; Ingka itself did not put a number on the savings.
• The contrast: a company whose Indian accounts had just shrunk 32.0% was, one year later, valuable enough for a European retail group to buy in full — because the value was the platform and its enterprise footprint, not the single-year Indian top line.

The money behind it

Locus raised roughly $78–80 million across its venture life before the acquisition. The cap table read like a who’s-who of growth investors, and the angels were operators, not just funds.

• Series A — May 2016, $2.75 million: led by Exfinity Venture Partners, with early backers including Blume Ventures.
• Series B — 13 May 2019, $22 million: led by Falcon Edge Capital (later Alpha Wave Global) and Tiger Global Management, taking total funding to about $28 million (Business Wire, TechCrunch).
• Series C — 2 June 2021, $50 million: led by GIC, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, with Qualcomm Ventures, Tiger Global and Falcon Edge participating; the company put total raised at around $80 million at the time (PR Newswire).
• Angel backers in the Series C included Amrish Rau (CEO, Pine Labs), Kunal Shah (founder, CRED), Raju Reddy (founder, Sierra Atlantic) and Deb Deep Sengupta (former SAP South Asia MD) — a signal of enterprise-software credibility.
• Reported valuation: secondary trackers pegged the 2021 round at roughly $300 million; the figure was never officially confirmed and PR Newswire’s own release did not state a valuation.

How Locus makes money

Locus is enterprise SaaS, so the revenue mechanics are subscription-and-usage, not a per-parcel take rate. The parts people get wrong are that it is a fleet operator (it is not — it owns no trucks) and that it charges shippers a commission (it does not — it licenses software).

• Money in: recurring software licences and platform fees tied to volume of deliveries, orders or routes processed by enterprise customers.
• Costs out: the dominant cost is talent — data-science and engineering salaries to build and run the optimisation algorithms — plus cloud infrastructure and enterprise sales.
• Where the margin sits: once the algorithms are built, each additional customer decision is cheap, so gross margin improves with scale; the drag is the long, expensive enterprise sales motion.
• The customer’s return, company-stated: $320 million-plus in cumulative transit-cost savings delivered to clients and 17 million-plus kg of greenhouse-gas reduction (Locus website, 2026) — the ROI pitch that justifies the licence fee.

The numbers

Public financials come from the Indian entity, Mara Studios Private Limited, which files with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs and captures only part of the group’s global revenue (much of it books through the US parent, Mara Labs, Inc.). Read the India numbers as a slice, not the whole.

• FY23 revenue of ₹97.0 crore ($10.1 million at $1 ≈ ₹96.0) fell 32.0% to ₹66.0 crore in FY24 (Inc42, statutory filings).
• FY24 profit after tax was ₹5.8 crore, up 222% year on year, against total expenses of ₹60.3 crore (Inc42) — the India entity was profitable even as its top line shrank.
• The FY23 profit of about ₹1.8 crore is implied from the stated 222% growth into the ₹5.8 crore FY24 figure, not separately reported; treat it as an estimate.
• Global recurring revenue is larger: a third-party tracker estimated group annual revenue at about $35 million in mid-2025 (getLatka estimate) — an estimate, not a filed figure, and excluded from the table above for that reason.

Where the money comes from

The revealing split is not by product line but by geography and legal entity — and it explains the headline paradox.

• Geography: Locus has run operations across the USA, UK, India, Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam and Germany (Series C release, June 2021), with the enterprise growth engine centred on global markets rather than India alone.
• Entity mix: the US parent Mara Labs consolidates the global business; the Indian Mara Studios entity books a subset. So a 32.0% drop in the India entity’s revenue in FY24 can sit alongside rising global delivery volumes — revenue recognition, not demand, moved.
• Customer type: revenue skews to large enterprises in retail, FMCG/CPG, e-grocery, 3PL and B2B distribution — fewer, bigger, stickier accounts rather than a long tail of small merchants.
• The surprise: the metric that grew was operational, not financial — deliveries optimised rose past 1.5 billion and daily automated decisions past 12 million (company website, 2026), which is the asset Ingka actually bought.

The risks

• Owner concentration and channel conflict: Locus is now wholly owned by Ingka Group. Its promise to keep serving customers “beyond Ingka Group” runs into an obvious tension — rival retailers may hesitate to route their delivery data through software owned by a competitor’s parent. The mechanism of harm is churn among non-IKEA enterprise accounts.
• Revenue volatility and disclosure opacity: the only audited public figures are for the Indian entity, and they fell 32.0% in FY24. With the group’s true consolidated revenue not publicly filed in India, outsiders cannot cleanly verify growth — a risk for anyone relying on the India numbers as a proxy.
• Competitive and platform risk: TMS and route optimisation is a crowded field with large incumbents and in-house teams at big logistics firms; as generative and agentic AI features become commoditised, Locus must keep its optimisation edge to justify licence fees, or margins compress.

The takeaway

The transferable lesson is not “pivot when you’re stuck.” It is subtler: the founders paid attention to how customers misused their product. RideSafe was built to protect passengers; delivery firms used its route-deviation engine to watch fleets. Locus exists because Rastogi and Garg treated that unintended use as the real signal and killed the product that was working to chase the one that mattered. A decade later, the buyer was a customer who decided the software was too important to rent. The through-line is the same discipline both times — follow the use, not the plan.

Frequently asked questions

What does Locus do?

Locus sells AI-based dispatch management and route-optimisation software to enterprises, helping them plan deliveries, sequence stops and allocate orders across last-mile and all-mile logistics. It owns no trucks; it licenses the decision-making layer.

Who founded Locus and when?

Nishith Rastogi and Geet Garg, both former Amazon engineers, founded Locus in 2015 in Bengaluru. It grew out of their earlier women’s safety app, RideSafe, whose route-deviation engine was adopted by delivery firms.

Who owns Locus now?

Ingka Investments, the investment arm of Ingka Group (the largest IKEA franchisee), acquired 100% of Locus in October 2025. Locus continues to operate independently as a subsidiary, keeping its brand and leadership. The price was not disclosed.

How much money did Locus raise?

Locus raised roughly $78–80 million across its venture rounds, including a $22 million Series B in May 2019 (Falcon Edge, Tiger Global) and a $50 million Series C in June 2021 led by GIC, with Qualcomm Ventures also participating.

Is Locus profitable?

Its Indian entity, Mara Studios Private Limited, reported a profit after tax of ₹5.8 crore in FY24, up 222% year on year, even though its operating revenue fell 32.0% to ₹66.0 crore. Group-level global financials are not publicly filed in India.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• Ingka Group newsroom — “Ingka Group acquires Locus” (October 2025)
• Locus press release — “Ingka Group Acquires Locus to Transform the IKEA Home Delivery Experience” (October 2025)
• Retail Dive / Supply Chain Dive — coverage of the Ingka–Locus acquisition (October 2025)
• PR Newswire — “Locus raises $50 million in Series C funding led by GIC” (June 2021)
• Business Wire — “Locus Raises $22 Million in Series B Funding” (May 2019)
• TechCrunch — “India’s Locus raises $22 million to expand its logistics management business” (May 2019)
• Inc42 — Locus company and financials profile (2026)
• Tofler / The Company Check — Mara Studios Private Limited corporate record, CIN U72200KA2015FTC104823 (2026)
• BW Disrupt — “From Safety To Logistics, Locus Says It Like It Is” (origin/pivot)
• Locus website — About and official information pages (September 2026)
• getLatka — Locus revenue estimate (2025)

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