Cashify, a re-commerce marketplace that sells and buys used smartphones and other electronic gadgets, has raised $15 million from Olympus Capital Asia.
Olympus Capital will make the investment through Asia Environmental Partners (AEP), its clean energy and sustainability platform.
“We are looking forward to accelerating our investment in the electronics reuse and recycling sector and thereby enabling OEMs and consumers to materially reduce their carbon footprint,” said Mandeep Manocha, founder and CEO of Cashify.
Founded in 2015 by Manocha, Nakul Kumar, and Amit Sethi, Cashify is an online platform to sell used mobile phones for instant cash and offers free home-pickups.
The start-up plans to use these funds to expand its footprint in India, through offline retail expansion.
“We plan to grow our offline stores from 60 to 150 over the next one and one-and-a-half years, as people like to touch and feel the phone before buying,” said Manocha, adding that the pandemic has boosted demand for second-hand smartphones and laptops because of online learning and work from home.
From selling 80,000 devices per month in September 2020, Cashify today sells more than 125,000 devices a month and is looking at achieving profitability in the next 6 months.
Cashify stores are present across Delhi-NCR, Mumbai, Bengaluru and in tier 2 cities like Patna, Kanpur and Ranchi. It also sells its own brand of refurbished smartphones under the brand ‘Phonepro’. The Indian market for refurbished phones is set to grow by 27% in the coming years, with the market size expected to reach $10 billion by 2022.
The funds will also be used for hiring and for expanding Cashify’s SaaS (software as a service) vertical, where the company will license its software to telecom operators and e-commerce companies in different parts of the world.
Cashify claims to have over 2 million customers and is a buyback partner for brands like Apple, Xiaomi, OnePlus, Vivo, Oppo, HP, Samsung and Dell in India.
“We are excited to be able to participate in the electronic devices reuse and recycle sector through investing in Cashify, the clear market leader. The management team at Cashify has an excellent track record in building a strong consumer-facing franchise and building relationships with OEMs, e-commerce companies and electronic product retailers to be present across all touchpoints for the consumer. We look forward to partnering the company in the next leg of its growth,” said Pankaj Ghai, Managing Director, AEP.
