In an interview with TimesTech, Zaiba Sarang, Co-founder of iThink Logistics, spoke about how the company is helping D2C brands reduce RTO rates through AI-led logistics intelligence and regional customization. She also highlighted iThink’s journey from ₹15-20 crore to nearly ₹100 crore in revenue while remaining bootstrapped, alongside its growing focus on Tier II and III markets and future agentic AI capabilities.
Read the full interview here:
TimesTech: How has iThink’s AI platform reduced RTO rates by 10-15% for D2C manufacturing brands?
Zaiba: The 8-12% is in absolute percentage points, a brand at the 30% national average drops to 22-18%, so this matters. The reduction comes from solving three structural problems, not from “AI” as a feature. First, every courier uses its own NDR nomenclature. A delivery agent marks “customer cancelled” while the customer tells our IVR they are still waiting. We become the single source of truth. Second, seller, buyer, and courier see the same verified status, no one guesses. Third, the response is context-specific. Invalid address triggers WhatsApp first, because IVR cannot capture long inputs. Customer refused triggers a Agentic Call followed by manual call, because intent recovery needs a voice.
Within 48 hours of an NDR, every shipment receives three IVR attempts, one WhatsApp, one SMS, and up to three manual calls — orchestrated by our ML models. The next day, our control tower confirms physical delivery on the ground. The last mile is still offline. AI tells us where to focus human attention; it does not replace it. Marico went from 16-20% RTO to under 10%.
TimesTech: What strategies drove iThink from ₹15-20 Cr to ₹100 Cr revenue while staying bootstrapped?
Zaiba: 5x growth in six years — FY20 at ₹15-20 Cr to FY26 closed at ₹98 Cr. One strategic choice early: focus only on D2C brands that had found product-market fit and were scaling. When they hit ₹1 Cr GMV, then ₹10 Cr, then ₹50 Cr, we removed the next bottleneck at each stage. They grew. We grew with them. Second choice: compete on cost per delivered order, not per-shipment rates. A 10-percentage-point RTO reduction is worth more to a D2C brand than a ₹5 cheaper AWB. That protected our margins and theirs.
The discipline shows in the scale — 30 million-plus shipments, 29,000-plus domestic pincodes, one platform.
Bootstrapping was not an ideological stance. It was a discipline. Every rupee of growth had to come from customer revenue. That forces you to build unit economics that compound.
TimesTech: How does iThink streamline supply chains for manufacturers shipping to Tier II/III markets?
Zaiba: 30% of our volume today goes to Tier II and Tier III pincodes, and this share is rising. The next 100 million D2C buyers are not in Mumbai or Bengaluru — they are in Patna, Indore, Coimbatore, Rajkot, Bhagalpur. Logistics built for metros breaks in these markets. We rebuilt for them.
Three things matter. First, our NDR team includes members who speak regional languages. A recovery call to Madurai happens in Tamil; in Bhagalpur, in Hindi.
Second, our IVR and WhatsApp at the NDR stage also customised as per brand tone , vibe and in regional languages.
Making Brand recall value high. A Hindi-only customer hangs up on an English IVR but engages meaningfully on a Hindi WhatsApp message. Language is not cosmetic, it is a conversion lever.
Third, our courier routing works at the pincode level. The same brand ships through different couriers for different pincodes, based on historical RTO for that exact pincode, not lowest cost. A courier strong in Mumbai may underperform in interior Maharashtra.
Tier II/III is not a discount version of metro shipping. It needs a different operating system. The brands that recognize this early will own the next wave of D2C growth.
TimesTech: What key client benefits, like volume discounts and real-time MIS, set iThink apart?
Zaiba: The way this question is usually framed, volume discounts, real-time dashboards, turns logistics into a feature comparison. The actual differentiator is structural. The key difference is that iThink is not only a shipping dashboard; it acts as an extended logistics partner for growing eCommerce brands.
We don’t compete on shipping rates. We compete on cost per delivered order. A 10-percentage-point RTO reduction is worth more than a ₹5 cheaper AWB.
The math we walk customers through: in a typical D2C business, roughly 15% of potential profit drains away on bad delivery economics, forward logistics, reverse logistics at 1.5x forward cost, shipping damages at 2% of GMV, 25% of marketing spend wasted on RTO orders, and 30% of operational support time spent reconciling courier issues.
With our stack in place, customers typically see logistics cost down 5%, reverse logistics down 15%, damages down 50%, CAC efficiency up 33%, and resource wastage down 20%. Net: 60-90% recovery of previously lost profit.
On top of that, sellers get next-day COD remittance, a single API across seven major courier partners, a dedicated KAM for every active account, and most transparent weight discrepancy resolution with ITL. Table stakes. The cost-per-delivered-order math is what moves the margin.
TimesTech: What 2026-27 expansions in AI analytics position iThink beyond transactional shipping?
Zaiba: Our 2026-27 focus is moving from AI-recommended to AI-executed actions across NDR and delivery, what is today an ML and human-orchestrated stack progressively becomes an agentic layer, with humans escalated only on edge cases. We are actively testing this internally. Specifics will follow at the right time.
