When founders Jayant Jha, Ankit Saraf, and Anmol Gupta launched Yaantra in 2013, they weren’t just starting another business—they were addressing a deep-rooted issue in India’s smartphone market. Consumers had limited, often unreliable, options for repairing their devices. Either they paid exorbitant prices at official service centers or took a chance on local repair shops with no quality assurance. Seeing an opportunity to transform this fragmented sector, the trio set out to build a trusted, branded mobile repair service.
The Initial Investment
When Carpediem Capital first partnered with Yaantra, the company was generating Rs. 1 crore in monthly revenue and had just started generating a marginal profit. While their primary focus was mobile repairs, while doing our due diligence on the investment, we identified that their capability to repair mobiles could be leveraged to scale the business into a much larger segment—refurbishing smartphones and reselling them. This operational pivot contributed 85% to their topline at the time of the exit. While mobile repairs were a great starting point, the refurbished smartphone market had massive untapped potential.
With India’s growing appetite for high-end smartphones, there was a strong demand for affordable, professionally restored devices.
Pivoting to Scale
The evolution from a mobile repair service into a full-fledged refurbished smartphone brand, necessitated the broadening of its business model. This scale-up and strategic transition required multiple fundraising rounds to support increased capital needs. It also demanded the enhancement of senior-level bandwidth. To support this, we introduced the team to a seasoned industry veteran with key leadership experience at Bharti Group, Godrej GE Appliances, and Reliance Communications. He went on to play an instrumental role in scaling the business.
A critical component of the refurbished smartphone ecosystem is building strategic partnerships—with OEMs, e-commerce platforms and financing and insurance providers. We leveraged our network to facilitate key connections, including OEMs like Samsung and Apple, e-commerce platforms such as Flipkart and Amazon and financing partners like Bajaj Finance. Additionally, recognizing the importance of a robust reseller network, we proposed the idea of onboarding summer trainees and offering performance-based incentives to proactively engage and expand the reseller base.
From Startup to Market Leader
This remarkable transformation resulted in a 17x growth in monthly revenue. Yaantra was able to do this business at very attractive gross margins which is incomparable in the industry because no one had deployed the refurbishing caveat to smartphone reselling. This amplified their capability of remaining capital-efficient and profitable through the large part of the journey.
A Strategic Exit to Flipkart
The strategic exit turned out to be a mutually beneficial transaction. Flipkart was making low margins on the reselling business and found an opportunity in absorbing Yaantra by integrating its operations in-house. This acquisition improved Flipkart’s reselling margins in the refurbishing and reselling element of their business. Yaantra continued to grow 10x after the acquisition and cemented its position as a market leader.
