If you have ever been on a long road trip with extra space in your car or are interested in a way to make money during your travels, then Krsor is for you.
As play on the word “cursor”—which in Latin means “runner” or “messenger”—Krsor provides an opportunity for travelers to connect with shippers so that cars with excess capacity can help ship items in the direction they are already traveling. The startup is participating in the current cohort of the Launch Chapel Hill accelerator, which runs through the end of the month.
Joe Driscoll, Krsor’s founder, said that he came up with the idea of this startup after having a job that required him to travel every week from Fayetteville to Washington D.C., where he would only use up 50% of his car’s capacity.
“I thought, surely there has to be somebody who needs something shipped from where I’m coming from to where I’m going,” Driscoll said.
Intended for long-distance travel, he said that the app is trying to appeal to the average traveler who has extra space while driving.
“It would connect you with somebody who wants to ship something so that you could make some money on your trip and save the shipper some money,” he said.
He plans for this to be a trust-based system that will allow users to build a profile reputation, similar to Uber’s use of star ratings. To ensure the safety of the packages, Driscoll said that Krsor will also collect personal information from each traveler.
The startup plans to use a small, medium, and large shipping model to differentiate pricing for items. Packages that are 12-inch cube or smaller will be consider small, while packages that are 24″x24″ or smaller will be medium. For things that are 36″x36″ or smaller, they will fall into the large category. For anything larger than that—say, a surfboard or a recliner—the shipper will set the price.
Deliveries will be set to a person’s particular destination, but Driscoll said that in the future they may incorporate storage lockers and major retailers or gas stations to allow for checkpoints where packages that need multiple travelers can be picked up.
Driscoll also said that Krsor allows more control and visibility with the tracking of shipments than other competitors.
“The benefit that you get from using Krsor is that once the app is up and running, they’ll be able to track that shipment from when it’s picked up to when it gets to the destination,” he said.
In the early stages of Krsor’s development, college students were signed up to be travelers. Driscoll said that the reason that they were chosen was because they travel frequently and are more likely to adopt newer technologies.
So far, Driscoll says, there have been positive results from beta tests. He said that he has done most of the testing in the Triangle, with some additional trial runs in Moore County, where he lives.
The team at Krsor is currently working to create an iOS app, but in the future, they hope to make their website more functional and incorporate more marketing through social media and advertisements.
With the help of Innovate Carolina’s meet-and-greet that Launch Chapel Hill facilitated, Driscoll said that Krsor was able to expand its team by adding a few interns who are current UNC undergraduates.
Long term, Driscoll said that they are hoping to expand to using fleet operators and air travel as ways of delivering shipments.