A truck can be expensive even when it is doing absolutely nothing. Especially then. Before Pranav Goel helped build Porter, he and his future co-founders spent time with commercial-vehicle owners around Mumbai. They heard a particularly sour piece of advice: buying someone a commercial vehicle was a useful way to ruin an enemy. It was a joke with an instalment schedule attached.
Goel remembers the work behind that discovery: trips to outlying parts of the city, information collected, more than 500 owners consulted. He and Uttam Digga were working at J.P. Morgan. Their commutes and lunch breaks became opportunities to discuss small trucks and the business they were failing to find. The vehicles were already there. So were the customers. Getting the two together reliably was the difficulty.
Porter began in 2014. More than a decade later, Goel is its co-founder and executive vice chairman, having handed the chief executive’s role to Digga in 2023. The interesting distance between those titles is measured in dispatches, drivers and decisions about when a growing company should slow down.
Three friends, several cities, one problem
Goel spent his first ten years in Delhi before moving to Gujarat, then Kota and Kharagpur. He has credited his father with teaching him empathy. He also recalls arriving at Kharagpur with reservations about its size and leaving with a greater appreciation for substance over appearances. The place adjusted his expectations.
Goel’s working life began with a fairly recognisable graduate itinerary. He studied at IIT Kharagpur from 2007 to 2012, earning a master’s degree in economics, then worked at Cognizant and J.P. Morgan. An economics education is a useful accompaniment to a business concerned with idle assets. It also offers plenty of respectable alternatives to spending one’s free time asking truck owners difficult questions.
The founding team came together through friendships that predated the company. Goel knew Vikas Choudhary from Kota; Choudhary went on to IIT Kanpur and worked at Juniper Networks in Bengaluru. Digga was Goel’s contemporary at Kharagpur and later referred him to J.P. Morgan in Mumbai. Their conversations crossed the gap between finance and software, with Choudhary bringing the technical expertise.
In a 2016 account, Goel described coming from a business family in Gandhidham, Gujarat, and having helped the family business establish another revenue stream. He and Digga had seen the frustrations of arranging transport. Uber offered a visible example of what an on-demand marketplace could do. Their question was whether the same broad principle could work for goods.
The clock inside the truck
Ask how a delivery works and most people describe the journey. In a 2016 interview, Goel broke it into four parts: loading, travelling, unloading and waiting for the next trip. The last of these is easily overlooked. It produces no satisfying movement on a map. For the owner, however, it remains part of the working day.
His account of Porter’s early operations was unusually specific. The company charged for time at loading and unloading to encourage punctuality. GPS helped dispatchers see when a vehicle was late. The driver application used colours, symbols and regional languages to reduce the work required to use it. A marketplace had to fit the people doing the driving.
That attention to individual minutes explains the appeal of the business. A customer needs a vehicle at a particular place and time. A driver needs the next job to be close enough to make accepting it worthwhile. Finding a match can turn otherwise unproductive time into income. Finding it repeatedly is the operating challenge.
A marketplace needs neighbours
There is a slightly cruel initiation built into this kind of company. Before enough people use it, the service can disappoint precisely because too few people use it. A distant pickup is unattractive to a driver. A shortage of nearby vehicles makes the service unreliable for a customer. Both have good reasons to leave.
Goel described this early density problem in 2022. Low prices could help attract business, but the company paid for that encouragement. The founders had to get through the period before the network became sufficiently useful to sustain itself. In his telling, keeping drivers satisfied helped bring demand. Supply deserved attention of its own.
The same interview noted that some of Porter’s earliest drivers had become fleet owners and remained on the platform. That is a more particular kind of growth than adding a city to a presentation. It describes an existing participant being able to build a larger business within the network. For Goel’s original concern about vehicle ownership, it was a relevant test.
The financial obstacles extended beyond finding tomorrow’s customer. In January 2023, Goel discussed partnerships intended to give drivers access to short-term finance and vehicle-related financial products. The sums he mentioned included ₹10,000 and ₹15,000. Porter’s earnings records could help financial institutions assess applicants. A delivery platform was accumulating information that might be useful beyond the delivery.
There is a practical connection here. The driver’s vehicle is a working asset, with expenses that do not politely wait for a busy week. Access to formal finance was another problem the company could try to address through partnerships. Completing trips and maintaining the means to complete them belong to the same livelihood.
The founder changes seats
In August 2023, Porter announced a change at the top. Digga would become CEO. Goel would move from CEO to executive vice chairman. Shruti Ranjan Satpathy would take on the chief product and technology officer role, with responsibility extending across product, data and design. The original partnership continued with a different allocation of responsibilities.
At that point, Porter said it had served more than 13 million customers across 19 Indian cities and employed 2,600 people. Goel presented the leadership changes as preparation for expansion. A company of that size asks different things of its founders from the company that begins with three friends discussing an idea.
Moving seats is a useful detail in Goel’s story because it complicates the usual founder portrait. The company can grow while its first CEO changes jobs. His connection to Porter did not depend on keeping the same title indefinitely. Executive vice chairman remained a role inside the institution he had helped create.
Room for the furniture shop
Porter’s scale can sound abstract until Goel names the customers. In June 2025, he described local retailers, small manufacturers, furniture sellers and paint shops among the businesses using the platform. Around 85 per cent of revenue came from micro, small and medium enterprises. Their ordinary replenishments and deliveries were central to the business.
He also said that, in more than 90 per cent of cases, the vehicle owner and driver were the same person. The platform therefore joined small businesses on both sides of a booking. One needed goods moved; the other had invested in the equipment to move them. A successful match mattered to both.
That June, Goel set out ambitions for 2030: about 50 Indian cities and more than 1.2 million driver-partners. These were future targets. They describe the next stretch of work, with all the local complications that expansion brings. Every new city still needs the nearby customers and nearby vehicles that make the first booking worth repeating.
Knowing when to wait
In February 2026, EY named Goel and Digga the winners of its Entrepreneur Of The Year 2025 award in the Start-up category. The date takes a little untangling: the award carried the previous year’s name, while the announcement arrived in 2026. Recognition belonged to the two co-founders together.
By April, Goel was discussing another possible milestone: a public listing. Speaking at CII’s Unicorn Summit, he said Porter’s revenue and profitability made a public journey possible, while uncertainty about regulation and competition argued for patience. He wanted greater clarity around goods and services tax and social-security norms before proceeding.
“We hear from multiple advisors that you should embark on a public journey when you have more certainty about your future,” he said. It was an instructive position for someone whose company began by trying to reduce uncertainty in someone else’s working day. Being able to take the next step did not settle the question of timing.
“We want to build a lasting institution that far outlives us.”
Pranav Goel, reflecting on Porter’s legacy
There is room for less solemn material in the portrait. Goel has named The Lord of the Rings as a favourite book, dal makhani as a favourite dish and Norway’s northern lights as a dream destination. Asked to describe himself, he chose opinionated, inconsistent and kind. Corporate self-descriptions rarely make such generous provision for future disagreement.
His stated ambition is for Porter’s culture and values to survive its founders. That gives the story a longer horizon than an award ceremony or a listing date. It also brings it back to those early conversations around Mumbai: the owners, their vehicles, the next job. For a business built around movement, a great deal still depends on what happens while somebody waits.