For residents of cities like Delhi NCR, Mumbai and Bengaluru, owning and maintaining a car is an expensive and time-consuming affair. On one end are authorized services centers that are process-oriented but expensive, while on the other hand are local garages that are cost-effective but lack standardization and are untrustworthy. Carpathy was started in 2015 by Divyanshu Bansal, Himanshu Bansal, and Akshat Lavania to bridge this gap between authorized and local garages.
Akshat had worked with Hyundai Motors India in the past and realized that a cost-effective and reliable solution can be created for customers if the processes followed by authorized service stations can be brought to local garages and the quality is controlled centrally.
Divyanshu and Himanshu, who are serial entrepreneurs and come from a consumer tech background saw a huge opportunity and added the magic of technology to organize the fragmented market and bring scale.
Today, Carpathy is working with more than 160 service centers across 15 cities including Delhi, Mumbai, Chandigarh, Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Indore to name a few and has serviced more than 1,00,000 cars till date. The company works with all major auto insurers such as DHFL, Liberty and Bharti AXA to provide doorstep and in garage cashless claims to its customers. Major fleet operators such as Ola, Uber, Zoomcar, and Revv are also Carpathy’s clients for the maintenance and repair of their fleets.
For customers, Carpathy operates on an Online to Offline (O2O) model ie. Customers can book the services online and avail it on any Carpathy-affiliated garage. The company claims to be 40% cheaper and 2x faster than authorized service centers with the same output quality. The process of booking is also simple. When a customer books a service, Carpathy picks the car from the customer, the car is assigned to a nearby Carpathy garage where the work is monitored by a Carpathy representative at the workshop. Once the service is complete, the car is dropped back.
“We are trying to solve the problem of affordability and transparency in the industry by leveraging technology. The entire process at Carpathy is digital and customers are kept informed at each stage of the process. Any extra work (if required) is done after taking prior approval from the customer on the Carpathy app.” says Divyanshu, CEO of the company.
The domestic automotive aftermarket in India is huge and is estimated at Rs 75,000 crore growing at a CAGR of 14% according to an article by Economic Times published last year.
“This is a huge opportunity for us as an aggregator to combine these broken pieces. Going forward, Carpathy is planning to leverage its network to provide 360-degree car care services like buying tires, accessories, vinyl coatings, insurance renewal, POC and other car-related services. Our aim is to create a single point of sale for all car care services for customers.”
Sharing the future plans, Divyanshu said, “We want to be the largest network of car care services in India. We currently have more than 160 service centers across 15 cities in our network and are planning to expand to 1000+ garages across 40 cities in the next year.”
Carpathy competes with incumbents like Mahindra First Choice (MFC) – operating a network of 350 garages and startups like Pitstop and Gomechanic – that counts Orios and Sequoia as investors.
