Exclusive: Car services marketplace VOW CarClinic raises angel funding

Gurgaon-based GreyHair Ventures Pvt Ltd, which runs car servicing and repair startup VOW CarClinic, has raised an undisclosed amount of angel funding, the firm's co-founder Abhishek Menon Ramachandran told TechCircle.in.

The investment was made by Vishal Malik, founder and director of IT services firm Gemini Solutions and a group of Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi alumni.

"VOW CarClinic wants to be the OYO of the car servicing and automotive aftermarket space in India," Ramachandran said.

The Delhi-based startup, founded in early 2016, is a marketplace for car servicing and repair needs in the online-to-offline consumer internet space. Users can avail of the firm's services via a website and mobile application. It was established by Ramachandran and Harmeet Singh Hora, both of whom are engineers and Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Indore alumni.

Hora has previously worked at The Boston Consulting Group, Samsung Electronics and TV channel TEN Sports, while Ramachandran has held stints at management consulting firm PwC India and oil major Total.

In the last four months, the firm has scaled up its operations to four cities in the National Capital Region (Delhi, Noida, Ghaziabad and Faridabad) and claims to have seen a 10-fold increase in revenues.

The startup claims that they are clocking a revenue run-rate of Rs 15 lakh per month and are now planning to expand their operations to other major cities including Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Chennai.

The team said they are in talks with some top venture capital firms to close a pre Series-A round to fund their expansion plans.

Similar players in the automobile servicing space include GoMechanic which raised seed investment worth $250,000 (nearly Rs 1.68 crore) from Venture Catalysts in December last year, and Carcrew, which raised $500,000 (around Rs 3.4 crore) in an angel round led by TVS Group in November 2016. Car purchase and servicing platform BookMyTime last year acqui-hired car management startup Servicemykar.

In September 2016, Pune-based automotive services startup Demyto received funding from Deepak Nathani, co-founder of technology consulting firm Cybage Software Pvt. Ltd.

In June last year, online marketplace for used automobiles Droom raised Series B funding led by venture capital fund Beenext and Japanese internet company Digital Garage.