California- headquartered e-hailing company inDrive, which is making inroads across Africa, has acquired Master Delivery (MD), a SaaS platform for last-mile delivery, aiming to broaden its freight and courier delivery offering for small medium enterprises.

inDrive announced the acquisition yesterday as it revealed plans of strengthening its business-to-business (B2B) segment, by introducing new solutions in inDrive.Freight and inDrive.Couriers.

The company is expanding its B2B offering to better meet the specific needs of business customers, it says.

As part of the effort, inDrive is looking to introduce a number of features, ‘including a single business account, service level agreement with an on-time delivery guarantee, courier management system, consolidated analytics, and more’.

According to the company, with a range of business-focused tools, inDrive will ‘better support SMEs and expand opportunities in the enterprise-grade delivery market, where speed, reliability, and quality are critical’.

Following the acquisition, inDrive says MD’s team in charge of global expansion, will be joining inDrive to strengthen its capacity for segment development.

“The transaction also covers inDrive’s acquisition of MD’s exclusive technology and its integration into its existing offering to the B2B segment,” says the company.

It adds: “The team joining inDrive is bringing their expertise, experience, and patent-protected innovations, including unique solutions for delivery management, order batching, dispatch algorithms, and demand prediction solution.

“As part of the transaction, inDrive will obtain MD's proprietary technology code, enabling the company to leverage it at its discretion."

Daniil Petin, VP, mobility at inDrive, comments: “We have been successful at serving B2B customers with our mobility offering, and SMEs have shown high demand for inDrive.Couriers to provide last-mile courier delivery, with more than 160,000 businesses served in 39 countries.

“InDrive.Freight offers freight services with a range of vehicles, from minivans for small shipments to heavy semi-trailers and heavy large refrigerator trucks to deliver heavy or temperature-sensitive goods between cities, to over 162,000 B2B clients worldwide.

“We recognise the great potential of merging the inDrive and MD teams' knowledge and skills. Our expansive global scope and experience in scaling services to new markets, combined with technology allowing for the swift delivery of enterprise-grade services in as little as 30-40 minutes, with an impressive 95% on-time orders, will enable us to, rapidly and significantly, enhance our business offering.”