At 30, Rajesh Yabaji sat for an interview and used a word most founders avoid. His business, he said, was dhool-mitthi: dust and mud. Trucks, drivers, yards. Not the glossy end of technology. But Harvard Business School had just written a case study about it, and he called that 'extremely humbling'.
He came to trucking sideways. Yabaji graduated from IIT Kharagpur in 2010 with a degree in metallurgical and materials engineering. During a final-year internship, he has said, he fell in love with supply chain management and saw how inefficient India's freight industry was. He joined ITC and ran supply chain for its leaf tobacco business, a job that taught him how goods move at scale and how much of that movement is waste.
Many truckers went out of business and small shippers lost access to trucks.
In April 2015 he resigned. He walked away from a secure career at a major company to start BlackBuck with Chanakya Hridaya and Ramasubramaniam Balasubramaniam. The market they chose was brutal. Truckers ran on phone calls and personal relationships. Only about 7 per cent of truck drivers then had smartphones.The early signs, at least as one profile tells it, were good. A $5 million seed round in April 2015. Flipkart in with a $25 million Series B the same year. By the company's account, it turned EBITDA-positive within about four months. Accel co-led an $80 million Series D in 2019, and a $67 million round in July 2021 made BlackBuck a unicorn.
COVID hit the people who made the platform work. Many truckers went out of business and small shippers lost access to trucks. Yabaji shut down projects that weren't paying off and waived platform fees for small and medium shippers. Volumes later grew as those shippers came back.
November 2024 brought the public market: a ₹1,114.72 crore IPO priced at ₹273, listing on 22 November at about ₹279. Accel held 17 per cent and the three founders each held roughly 10.7 per cent going into it. The first quarters after were uneven: a ₹32 crore profit in the June quarter of FY25, then a ₹308 crore loss in the next, tied to a one-time item. Excluding it, the company would have posted a profit of about ₹39 crore.
For a founder, the useful detail is the word dhool-mitthi. Yabaji picked an unfashionable industry because he had seen its waste up close, and then spent a decade earning the trust of people who did not want an app.