Sequoia leads $5 Mn Series A round in car servicing startup GoMechanic

In what looks like the first funding in the online car servicing industry for CY19, GoMechanic, a three-year-old startup has received Rs 30-35 crore ($4-5 million) from Sequoia Capital in a Series A round.

GoMechaninc founder Kushal Karwa is also in talks with Snapdeal co-founder Kunal Bahl and OYO Rooms founder Ritesh Agarwal to raise more funds. It plans on investing these funds in expanding into new cities, building a brand, and make an increase in the top level hiring processes.

It boasts of 40 plus workshops in Delhi NCR alone and wishes to spread operations in Indore, Kanpur, and Jaipur now.

The company lets its users book their car services - repair and maintenance - online. Once that is done, it has a network of car workshop across the Delhi NCR, Hyderabad, Mumbai, and Pune that picks and drops back the car at the customer’s doorstep for free. It also lets consumers avail cashless insurance repairs.

It offers these services to the customers in around a 7-day period at rates discounted up to 40 per cent. The ability of the company to provide such heavy discounts comes from its efficiency in procuring parts, minimizing labour costs, and saving up on real estate costs as well.

The IIM-A alumni Kushal Karwa founded company boasts of an exclusive partnership with Uber and several other partnerships across the automobile and insurance sector. Some of its other partnerships include Spinny, Coverfox, Meru, Revv, Reliance General Insurance, and 91Springboard.

According to its Website, the Gurugram-based company claims 250k completed car services, 100k happy customers. In August 2018, it had raised an undisclosed amount from in a seed round from early-stage investor Orios Venture Partners and angel investor Dhianu Das.

It had also raised $250k from Venture Catalysts in 2016.

It’s major competitor Pitstop, on the other hand, hasn’t been able to raise funds as large as GoMechanic since their inception in the same year. Last April, Pitstop had completed a $2.6 million pre-Series A round from Goldbell Group and Blume Ventures that was procured in two tranches across 2 years. In 2016, the company had raised $300k from angel investors.

Going further, it would be interesting to see how these competitors are able to fare in the Rs 33,000 crore worth car servicing industry, as Mint cites from CarXpert’s research.