Bangalore-based Chatpay Commerce Pvt Ltd, which operates after-sales car service provider Pitstop, has raised $1 million (Rs 6.5 crore ) in its pre-Series A round of funding from Blume Ventures, Singapore-based Goldbell Group, and a group of angel investors, a report in a financial daily stated.
The angel investors are Anurag Srivastava, managing partner and co-founder of technology investment firm Jungle Ventures; Shailesh Rao, head of Google’s cloud business unit; Amiya Pathak, co-founder of consumer lending platform EzCred; Rajesh Yohanan, former Asia Pacific head at Citibank; and Rahul Garg, angel investor.
The company will use the new funds to ramp up its technology platform, provide doorstep services and invest in adding more vehicles, The Economic Times reported, citing the company’s co-founder Mihir Mohan Mishra.
E-mail queries sent to Pitstop did not immediately elicit a response at the time of filing this report.
In January last year, VCCircle reported that the company raised an undisclosed amount in angel funding from founders of Myntra and Livspace.
Founded by IITians Mishra and Nirant Ramakuru, Pitstop aims to standardise the unorganised auto service industry while offering a booking platform for repairs from garages and auto care centres. The company’s target audience are customers whose dealership service warranty has expired. Using the company’s online platform, customers can place a car service request, track service progress, get notifications regarding updates on service orders, and make payment as well.
The company claims that its data algorithms help save car maintenance costs by 40%.
Pitstop has a network of branded and certified garages in two segments – first, where people who have cars older than three years and are looking for a cheaper alternative in independent garages; and the second segment is for people who own second-hand cars.
Pitstop taps and standardises independent garages where service cost is relatively low compared with dealer service centres and acts as an agency, which certifies these garages for quality for use of genuine parts and accessories, provide systems to garages so that they can serve a customer better, and do better capacity planning.
The company is currently operational in Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai and Delhi-NCR.
A few ventures in the online automobile servicing space have raised funding recently.
In August, media reports stated that car repair and automobile servicing startup GoMechanic raised a seed funding round from Orios Venture Partners.
In June this year, automobile parts marketplace SparesHub.com, run by Iradium Automobiles Pvt. Ltd, raised Rs 2 crore ($311,000) from a clutch of investors including The Chennai Angels, Singapore-based Anthill Scale Ventures, US-based Esvee Technologies Inc, and Inc95 Consulting.
In March, StatSoft Technologies Pvt Ltd, which runs online car servicing platform BookServicing, raised Rs 20 lakh ($30,000) in seed funding from the National Science and Technology Entrepreneurship Development Board (NSTEDB), a government arm that promotes tech enterprises.
In February, Northerly Automotive Solutions Pvt Ltd, which runs and operates automobile services platform GoBumpr, raised $300,000 (Rs 2 crore) in a round led by The Chennai Angels.