Airtel boosts Airtel X labs portfolio with Quikmile acquihire

Telecom company Bharti Airtel on Monday announced the 'acquihire' of Gurgaon based Quikmile, a start-up focused on building tech-enabled logistics platforms for India. The company did not disclose the size of the 'acquihire' deal, which typically entails the acquisition of people or teams.

"Quikmile's team will now be a part of Airtel X Labs – Airtel's digital innovation factory, which focuses on IoT, Digital Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning," Airtel said in a statement. Airtel X Labs team comprises of professionals from India and abroad, the statement said, adding that it is building advanced digital capabilities to serve the emerging needs of Digital India and is rapidly scaling up its teams and scope of work.

Quikmile, which started operations in 2018, aims to harness the power of digital technology to transform India's highly disorganized logistics sector and bring efficiency, quality, and safety to fleet owners. This includes easy monitoring of fleet minutiae such as engine behavior, tire conditions, mileage, etc to remove transportation issues such as route planning, demand forecasting, analyzing vehicular performance, and organized achievement of targets.

It also resolves manpower issues through monitoring of driver behavior by tracking complex data to basic information such as distance traveled per day, maximum and average speed, harsh braking, etc, the statement said. "India is now amongst the largest economies in the world but has a highly disorganized and inefficient logistics sector. We see a massive opportunity to solve problems for this segment through scalable technology solutions and workforce management platforms that will make organizations much more efficient," Harmeen Mehta, Global CIO, and Director - Engineering, Bharti Airtel said.