René Seifert – Entrepreneur & Global Citizen

In fact it’s already one year ago, but were were asked by the founder to keep a low profile in terms of communication in order not to attract unnecessarily competition. When I say “we”, I mean the fine group of entrepreneurs and executives from MumbaiAngels which I had joined one and a half years ago.

A few weeks back, we got the green light that communication was free. So I wanted to post a few lines on the company, the founder and why I thought it was a good idea to invest. Reverse Logistics India (RLC) operates in a space which at the first glance does not appear as sexy as promising to build the next Facebook. But I have learned well from my entrepreneurial experience that such businesses can bear an amazing business potential in combination with very healthy margins and – unlike Facebook – really make money :-)

So what does RLC do? To provide a simple example: An Indian consumer buys a new mobile phone with one of the big retailers, after a few weeks well within the warranty-period the things breaks. What now? So far in India, for retailers unlike in the U.S. or Europe, the legal obligation to manage the scenario is just in the making and therefore the priority of installing a proper process rather low, whereby plenty of customers have been left behind dissatisfied. Or, the retailers did not know how design the process at all.

This is where RLC as the outsourced solution comes into place: Organizing this entire process end to end with both satisfying the customer and recouping value in mind. Concretely, the company would on behalf of the retailer handle the customer from communication, picking up the broken item from his home, delivering it to RLC’s delivery centre to finally inspecting it. The inspection can yield that the item has to be disposed of (within the legal framework of “e-waste” in India) or, if it can be repaired, resell it. Just a simple example with plenty of variations and different use-cases.

RLC, based out of Delhi, runs by now two additional operating centres out of Mumbai and Bangalore. I met the founder Hintendra Chaturvedi last year January in Delhi and was impressed by his vision how to occupy this under-served market in a big picture, yet at the same time keep a razor-sharp focus on getting traction in this extremely “execution-heavy” industry. Interestingly, Hitendra is one of these famous cases of “reverse brain drain”: He had been living in the U.S. for two decades or so, before he took an executive position to run the OEM-division of Microsoft India. There, he realized that this huge sphere of “reverse logistics” he had see in the U.S. did not exist on the subcontinent and decided to set-up his own company. Here, on LiveMint is a nicely written portrait about him along with a sound depiction of the reverse logistics-landscape in India.

We from MumbaiAngels were convinced both about the concept and the founder so that we decided to give it a go by providing the necessary seed-funding. Good to know that a year down the line, RLC has been building traction with several marquee-customers and Hitendra is step by step executing on his vision.