Our First Steps to Perpetuity

A Short Story About Symbols

There is a small service road in Nagasandra, on the outskirts of Bengaluru, where Locus took its first steps, working out of a rented apartment. In those first months, there was just a quiet stretch of road, a rented flat, and a handful of people learning how to make hard things simple.

More recently, the view outside that apartment window changed. The IKEA Bengaluru store opened across the road, coloured with blue and yellow signage, and brimming with customers from all over Bangalore.

Today, we announced that Locus is joining the Ingka Group (IKEA Retail). If you are the sentimental kind, you might call it a sign. If you are the science kind, you might call it a series of compounding decisions. For us, it is both signs and science.

Where We Started

We began with an audacious goal: to automate and optimise all human decisions required to move a package or person between any two points on earth. We were a tiny team with a whiteboard that never erased cleanly. Our first customer wins felt like moon landings. When a delivery hit its SLA, someone rang an actual bell. When a route plan shaved minutes and emissions, we took a picture of the dashboard.

A few years later, across the street, IKEA welcomed customers looking for better ways to live. Inside our office, we were learning how to ship better ways to deliver. That proximity (albeit across space-time) became a quiet North Star for product thinking: design that respects reality, systems that scale, and choices that explain themselves.

The Journey So Far

Over the years, we built Locus into an AI‑powered Transport Management System for all miles and all channels. We unified orders, capacity, carriers, and live signals into one living plan. We shipped co‑pilot experiences that show the next best action, explain trade‑offs, and keep teams in control. We learned to hold two truths at once: innovation is thrilling but reliability is sacred.

Why Ingka, Why Now

Joining the Ingka family sets Locus up for perpetuity. It gives us additional resources to pursue long‑term research and product innovation.

We also share a working ethos. Ingka and Locus are pragmatic, people-first, and planet-minded. We value simplicity, cost-conscious impact, continuous improvement, entrepreneurial ownership, and leadership by example.

Locus continues as a standalone company within Ingka Group with full operational autonomy. Our brand, culture, leadership, team, clients, and roadmap remain intact. What changes is our capacity to deliver: more resources to innovate, build, test, and deploy; more scale to serve enterprises everywhere.

What This Means for Our Customers

We are now set up for perpetuity, with strong financial muscle to pursue our long-term research goals and invent the future for our customers.

• The same team you work with today continues, now with more resources.
• Our focus on enterprise-grade privacy, separation, and compliance remains non-negotiable.
• Our product direction stays steady: an agentic TMS that aligns planning, dispatch, exceptions, and settlement so SLAs hold, empty miles fall, and utilisation climbs.

We will be able to move faster on the complex problems that create outsized operational wins.

Endless Gratitude

Startups are never solo acts. They are orchestras with rotating seats and relentless rehearsals. We owe this moment to:

Our team, past and present. You carried on-call nights, customer escalations, data migrations, 6 a.m. standups, and 6 p.m. demos with grace.

Our customers who trusted us with their live operations and taught us more than any textbook could.

Our investors (past and present)  who backed our audacious vision, and imparted their wisdom to us. 

Our partners, who scaled with us and held us to higher standards. 

Our advisors and early friends who lent rooms, routers, and reputations when we had none.

Our families who stood by us, and cheered through it all.

What’s Next

We will keep building the world’s most real-world Transport Management System in the form of a Digital Supply Chain Officer. Our ambition now reaches further, pairing software agents with purposeful hardware to close the loop between intention and action, plan and proof, promise and delivery.

I am personally grateful to everyone who brought us here and energized us for what comes next. The road ahead is long, and we choose it gladly:

“The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.” – Robert Frost

Read the official announcement here