Y Combinator-backed startup takes a shot at dominating car repairs in India

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There are over 28 million cars on India’s roads. Thanks to poor roads, crazy traffic, and erratic driving, a car will have to visit a garage multiple times in a year. In 2015 alone, there were 118,438 road accidents recorded.

This is the field ServX is playing in. The startup has a mobile app that helped close to 90,000 users get their cars repaired – over 150,000 repairs – last year.

One-year-old ServX is in the current Winter 2017 batch of Y Combinator and will be launching afresh on March 20. It has plans to grow threefold this year.

“In India, when your car is broken, you have two options. You can either go to an authorized garage and pay a ton of money. Or you can go to a local garage, pay less money, and get poor service – you’ll never know if the spare parts used were genuine,” ServX co-founder and CEO Akansh Sinha says, explaining the problem it is tackling. “ServX connects users to authorized garages which are vetted by our in-house mechanics.”

Chinese app Tuhu, which sells auto parts and connects drivers with garages, raised around US$100 million in August 2015. The startup was valued between US$300 million to US$400 million back then.

ServX has a similar model, except that it’s in India, where a big chunk of the after-sales car service and repairs market is unorganized. Small garages pepper the streets in India. These local mechanics command a substantial clientele and most of their business is unaccounted for. So, it is tough to peg a reliable number to the size of this market. Estimates vary from US$10 billion to US$55 billion, says Akansh.

ServX founders Akansh Sinha and Anubhav Deep. Photo credit: ServX.

Multiple companies are in the field already, some of them with deep pockets. Bangalore-headquartered Bumper, Cartisan, Getcarexpert, and Carworkz by Mahindra are a few.

But the problem is still far from solved and ServX has a few aces up its sleeve, believes Akansh. Quick and inexpensive service through its network of authorized car dealers, for one.

Akansh founded the startup with Anubhav Deep, his collegemate from the Birla Institute of Technology in Mesra, Ranchi, in November 2015.

See: Why do Ola, Quikr, CityFlo love this startup?

The network effect

Akansh and his five-member team spotted an Achilles heel early on – that most authorized car dealers in India are working below capacity. To get an authorized dealership from any of the car brands would cost millions of dollars in capital. For example, the minimum amount of capital you will need to get a Maruti-Suzuki dealership is US$11.5 million, Akansh points out.