“It was a very fuzzy idea,” recalls Sandeep Deshmukh. Among the first few employees of Amazon India, the software engineer was instrumental in building last-mile delivery for the American online retailer in India. During his five-year stint—just two months short of five years to be precise—Deshmukh spotted a massive cloud on the horizon. “There was no fulfilment ecosystem in India, especially deep across the hinterland,” he recalls. And whatever did exist was too rudimentary and primitive. “There was hardly any tech and digitisation,” he says, explaining how the last-mile delivery was almost missing. He, along with Shitiz Bansal and Saurabh Nigam, quit their jobs in 2016 and started ElasticRun.