VOW CarClinic To Target Car Servicing & Automotive Aftermarket in India, Bags Angel Round

Have you ever faced exorbitant price charged for car servicing by the authorized dealerships? 

The next best option left with a car owner is to send his car to local garage and to everyone’s
dismay, a trusted local garage is tough to find. Online classifieds still continue to offer limited utility of discovery, broad pricing and quality information. Finally even if one manages find a nearby local garage, his wholeday is wasted sitting at service location to get the work done. Worst still he has to haggle for prices after service completion. Net-net while he did save some money it still remains an excruciating overall experience. Got a better way to handle your car care and maintenance? Enter VOW CarClinic.

VOW CarClinic is a differentiated marketplace for end-to-end car servicing/repair needs in the O2O (offline-to-online) consumer internet space and currently serves allover Delhi NCR through its website and mobile app platforms (on Android and iOS). In a nutshell, VOW CarClinic envisages to be the OYO counterpart budget brand within multi-billion USD car servicing and automotive aftermarket space in India.

VOW CarClinic was founded by Harmeet Hora and his junior Abhishek Menon – Both MBAs from IIM Indore in early 2016. Founders were both Ex-Consultants at BCG and PwC respectively
who bring combined 10+ years of experience in operations and strategy and have also worked with global firms like Samsung and oil major TOTAL before.

Just to put the market as a whole into perspective, car servicing space in India is a billion dollar plus market with 30 Mn cars on the road and the number is growing at an alarming rate with ~3
million new cars sold year-on-year that adds to it. Frost & Sullivan’s  Auto Aftermarket Report 2015 suggests that 70% of car owners move to local garages post the expiry of free services and the aftermarket service scenario is highly fragmented with severe shortcomings. Lack of transparency in services, non-standardized pricing, discovery hassle, long queues and delivery waiting periods are few pain points people keep encountering. To add more to the woes, local garages are marred deeply by quality as well as trust issues. VOW CarClinic simplifies the whole process offering uniform service experience to car owners by on-boarding local garages and standardizing their price, drives-in efficiencies to processes and quality. Since its launch in early 2016, VOW has emerged as the fastest growing player in Delhi NCR within the segment.

Abhishek says “Though the sector seemingly comes across as a crowded space, most players in the market broadly either have limited service offerings (full-stacked doorstep model) which is bound to face scale issues with growing order volumes or they have quality limitations on services/supplies with low value-add and control (vanilla marketplace model) where customer experience takes a hit. VOW addresses these gaps – as it owns the complete customer experience, source the products used while being able to maintain its asset-light model - with less time to market and scale vis-à-vis competition. A 30 days post service warranty is also provided on all services offered by us.”

Post a phenomenal customer response on its service platform and successful execution in Gurgaon, VOW CarClinic had closed an undisclosed angel round from Vishal Malik, CEO at Gemini Solutions and other IIT-D alumni in August 2016. In the last four months, they havescaled up their operations to 4 more cities in NCR (Delhi, Noida, Ghaziabad andFaridabad) and have witnessed 10x fold increase in their revenues.  Currently, they are clocking revenue run-rate of INR 15 lacs per month and are now planning to expand their operations in othermajor cities including Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Chennai. The team is in talks with few top VCs to close pre- Series-A round to fund their expansion plans.

It will face head on competition in other markets from direct competitors like Cartisan, Droom, Pitstop, Steero etc. But then all these players mostly still remainon level playing field to capture the automotive services aftermarket, which makes it exciting to watch out for the emergence of a clear segment leader as the market remains huge and mostly untapped.