Why We Invested in Amicco?

In India’s sprawling automotive services landscape, a car sitting idle in the repair bay is more than just an annoyance — it’s a microcosm of inefficiencies that run rampant at scale. Our latest investment in Amicco is, at its heart, about tackling these inefficiencies head-on. By building a next-generation spare parts procurement platform, Amicco is giving independent garages something they’ve always lacked: reliability at speed. We believe this approach can fundamentally reshape the multi-billion-dollar automotive aftermarket segment.

Team Amicco

The Daily Grind of Spare Parts Sourcing

Cars in India endure a uniquely harsh regimen: stop-and-go city traffic, pitted roads, and extreme temperature fluctuations. Naturally, repairs begin stacking up quickly once warranties end. So, while roughly 30% of car owners stick with OEM service centres post-warranty, the majority opt for local garages. These independent workshops offer the attraction of lower labour costs (on average 40% cheaper than OEM shops) and widespread availability, but they also suffer a crippling flaw: unpredictable spare parts sourcing.

Within a typical garage’s procurement, you can broadly bucket parts into four categories:

• Category A (10%): Bulk or commodity purchases, often priced uniformly. Garages face strong price sensitivity here but rarely major availability hurdles.
• Category B (40%): Everyday, commonly used spares — ironically subject to the greatest volatility in price. A brake pad that costs 650 rupees today could be 720 rupees tomorrow if the local retailer switched brands, leaving garages feeling whipsawed by the market.
• Category C (20–25%): Parts that do exist somewhere locally but require multiple hops. A shop in Gurgaon might have to dispatch a runner to a distant Delhi market to find them.
• Category D (20–25%): Truly elusive spares, whose scarcity can immobilise a car for days or weeks. Price sensitivity drops significantly at this stage; the garage just wants the part — whatever it costs.

A single vehicle model can encompass hundreds of thousands of SKUs, pushing every local workshop into a daily scavenger hunt. They’re forced to rely on a handful of mom-and-pop retailers, each with variable prices and limited inventory. Every morning kicks off the same tedious routine: garage owners juggling phone calls, dispatching runners, or personally driving from one parts store to another, hoping to track down an elusive compressor or brake assembly. With no centralised database, no reliable price transparency, and no guaranteed availability, the outcome is a swirl of guesswork and inefficiency:

• Repairs delayed: If a workshop can’t secure an essential spare quickly, the car just sits there — racking up storage costs and annoying customers.
• Labour wasted: A dedicated resource (or two) often does nothing but source parts all day, negotiating random prices with each retailer.
• Frayed customer experience: Without clarity on timelines or final repair costs, the car owner is left in limbo, denting the local garage’s reputation.

Multiply these inefficiencies across thousands of garages in every urban centre, and the scale of the problem is astonishing. Cars stay longer in workshops than they should. Mechanics are burdened with non-core tasks. And local garage owners, who might otherwise invest time in diagnosing complex engine issues or improving service quality, end up whittling away hours on procurement runs.

Amicco’s Streamlined Marketplace

Amicco has set out to change this status quo by building a vertical marketplace dedicated to spare parts procurement. Here, a garage can log in, check if a part is available, see a real price (instead of haggling with three different retailers), and finalise delivery details without leaving the workshop.

This consolidated demand approach does more than just spare owners a few phone calls:

• Cuts operational dead time: With Amicco, garage owners free up staff previously tasked with physically hunting for parts.
• Price certainty: Random markups and hidden margins give way to transparent, consistent pricing, reducing the friction that typically plagues the buying process — especially in Category B, where fluctuation is a real headache.
• Fast access to harder-to-find parts: By aggregating demand across multiple garages, Amicco can tap into a broader supplier network than any single workshop could, delivering a powerful boost for the tougher Category D spares.

Although still young, Amicco’s early rollout in Delhi NCR is already delivering tangible outcomes. We’ve spoken to garages there that mention saving hours daily, having fewer disputes over part quality or final costs, and, most importantly, turning cars around more quickly for customers.

Deep Founder-Market Fit

A formidable market problem is best solved by a leader who has felt the pain points on the ground. Founder Vivek Aalok has precisely that journey. Early in his career, Vivek spent time at JP Morgan’s US automotive practice, gaining a vantage point on how top carmakers navigate equity research and capital markets. He went on to guide strategy for First Data’s Asia-Pacific business — before the company listed on the NYSE — scaling operations across multiple countries.

The defining chapter, from our perspective, was his time at Spinny, India’s used-car unicorn. Joining Spinny pre-Series A, Vivek spearheaded both supply and demand operations that scaled from a trickle of cars sold monthly to over 6,000 per month. Managing thousands of employees across multiple verticals, he repeatedly encountered a persistent bottleneck: once they tried to service or refurbish cars, spare parts sourcing derailed operations. If Spinny — a venture-backed startup with relatively deep pockets — had this mighty struggle, the typical neighbourhood garage had to be drowning in inefficiency.

That realisation seeded the concept for Amicco. Vivek’s unique blend of domain expertise (automotive operations at scale), capital markets savvy, and network within India’s auto ecosystem gave him the clarity to build a solution that addresses precisely the friction points no one else had resolved.

The Underlying Economics and Opportunity

India’s spare parts market (excluding tyres and batteries) is estimated at $5–10B, powered largely by local garages servicing out-of-warranty cars. Though this fragmentation causes daily headaches for mechanics, it also preserves combined markups that can exceed 40% across retailers, wholesalers, and distributors. That margin-rich environment spells an opportunity for any platform that can streamline demand, lock in transparent pricing, and reliably deliver parts.

For Amicco, these fundamentals open multiple avenues for expansion. Once they establish trust with garages for day-to-day parts, extending into tyres and batteries (themselves multi-billion-dollar categories) becomes a natural progression. The prevalence of unbranded parts also creates room for private-label offerings at higher margins — once enough garages have embraced Amicco as their go-to supplier. Looking further ahead, as the network of garages scales, India’s manufacturing base could fuel export opportunities, connecting global markets hungry for dependable, cost-effective spares.

Why We’re Backing Amicco

When we first evaluated the segment, we recognised several structural complexities: high fragmentation, entrenched distributor networks, and the capital intensity of managing inventory. Yet Amicco’s approach convinced us for several key reasons:

1. Founder’s background: Vivek spent years wrestling with the exact supply chain knots he’s now untying. No one is guessing about which corners of automotive are most painful; the day-to-day experience at Spinny made that crystal clear.
2. Focus on true value-add: Rather than attempting to overhaul the entire spare parts market in one go, Amicco zeroes in on the core friction point — making the standard, daily procurement of spares far less chaotic for local garages.
3. High retention and upsell potential: Garages that solve their parts headache rarely revert to the old manual approach. Once Amicco becomes the go-to partner for daily spares, cross-selling into tyres, batteries, or private labels becomes a natural extension.
4. Healthy margins and quick cash cycles: Automotive parts can turn over quickly, and if you solve for consistent supply, the margin structure is robust.
5. Massive unstructured market: Nearly thousands of garages in just one part of Gurgaon rely on roughly 250 independent retailers. This fragmentation is repeated across every major city in India. Whenever demand and supply are so disaggregated, a platform that brings them together typically wins big.

Core Team Beyond the Founder

In addition to Vivek, Amicco’s leadership team features several key hires who collectively bring decades of experience in operations, supply chain, B2B sales, and product innovation:

• Tanmay Rajvanshi joined early with a track record of leading large teams, establishing strategic partnerships, and managing extensive business operations across regions, including automotive. He currently focuses on streamlining the supply chain side of the business.
• Rajat Singh brings a product-first mindset, using data and systems thinking to address complex challenges such as cataloguing, logistics, and warehouse management in a highly fragmented space.
• Abhinay Sharma has deep insights into B2B customer needs across various industries, designing solutions for structural challenges while developing high-performing sales teams. His hands-on approach helps identify and address root-level customer pain points, driving strong results.

This blend of domain savvy and technical rigour underpins each new development at Amicco, ensuring the platform scales seamlessly as more garages sign on and supply chain networks deepen.

Current Progress

Since launching earlier last year, Amicco has focused on Gurgaon, onboarding select garages and establishing partnerships with over 100 retailers across NCR. By unifying inventory under one digital roof, Amicco offers the broadest part available to any garage in the city. On the back of this foundation, monthly transactions have continued to soar at a high clip since our investment, demonstrating how strongly partner garages have embraced the platform. Meanwhile, the team has expanded to 25+ members, including those dedicated to distributor partnerships, garage engagement, and logistics.

These achievements mark only the first leg of what we anticipate to be a sustained growth curve as more garages experience the operational lift in partnering with Amicco.

Looking Ahead

We see Amicco as more than just a convenient procurement app; it’s an engine for modernising a deeply entrenched, often overlooked market. The platform frees local mechanics to focus on delivering quality automotive service by relieving small garages of the daily scramble for spare parts. As Amicco scales geographically, it will forge a national — and eventually international — network of parts manufacturers, distributors, and retailers, setting the stage for expansions into high-value categories, private-label branding, and a direct bridge to India’s manufacturing hubs for export demand.

We’ve invested in Amicco because its mission aligns with our belief that genuinely large markets are best tackled by founders who’ve seen the problems up close and are driven to fix them. Vivek and his team embody that spirit, matching deep sector expertise with operational skills to turn a blueprint into reality. The automotive aftermarket is vast and, until recently, stuck in outdated systems. We’re excited to help catalyse its transformation — one spare part at a time.