He pivoted thrice – almost shut down twice – before Singapore’s Goldbell backed him

Pitstop founder Mihir Mohan. Photo credit: Pitstop.

“I call myself a serial failure,” quips Pitstop founder Mihir Mohan when I ask him about his earlier startup adventures. That was unexpected.

I have heard countless people describing themselves as “serial entrepreneurs” but never a “serial failure.” No matter what statistics say about 95 percent of startups around the world failing within years, failure – especially one’s own – isn’t something entrepreneurs joke about.

But Mohan was talking to me after raising US$1 million in a pre-series A round co-led by Singapore’s Goldbell Group and India’s Blume Ventures for his latest startup, Pitstop.

The Pitstop’s tech stack will go live in Singapore in a month’s time.

This investment came after he raised US$350,000 in seed rounds in May and December 2016. The funding had come from 15 angel investors. Most of them were experienced founders and senior executives, like Ramakant Sharma (founder of Livspace) and Anurag Srivastava (co-founder of Jungle Ventures). Edureka founders Lovleen Bhatia and Kapil Tyagi, former Google India head Shailesh Rao, and Zipdial co-founder Amiya Pathak jumped in too, to name a few. Alex Chua, chief operating officer of Goldbell Group, invested US$75,000 in his personal capacity last year, and knew Pitstop well before Goldbell joined the latest round.

Pitstop is a car maintenance and service provider, with a software-as-a-service product for garages and automobile workshops. It’s currently operating across Bangalore, Delhi, and the National Capital Region (NCR) in India. The investors who have backed it are no fools. They are excited about the “multi-billion-dollar opportunity” in building an auto after-sales service platform, says Sajid Fazalbhoy, principal at Blume Ventures.

The supply problem

Pitstop was founded by Mohan and Nirant Ramakuru, both mechanical engineers from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) – Kanpur, in August, 2015.

The problem statement they began with is simple: car owners need regular servicing and repairs for their vehicles. There are around 28 million cars running on Indian roads alone, so there could be no dearth of demand. But the crunch was in the supply side.

There are 28 million cars on Indian roads. Photo credit: Lingaraj GJ

Car owners rarely found garages that delivered reliable, convenient, and economical vehicle servicing. How do you know which roadside garage you could trust with your car – a prized possession for most car owners? Most car brands have their authorized service centers in the cities but they are expensive and often upsell repairs and spare parts to customers. “The authorized centers would charge you for their fancy infrastructure like a lounge to wait while your car is getting serviced – which isn’t really an enjoyable thing to watch. What we are saying is you should not be paying for their sofas and tiles,” says Mohan.

Pitstop has tied up with around 90 garages in Bangalore and 50 in Delhi and surrounding areas. “We have deeply integrated with them. We provide these garages with three things: consistent business, which is their main need; technology and other tools to make sure that business is run efficiently; and spare parts, which are critical from a customer’s point of view,” Mohan says.

The importance of spare parts should not be underestimated in markets like India rife with fake products.

The first wash-out

The B2B pivot