For most consumers, an old phone sits in a drawer for years before it is discarded, exchanged or passed on. Cashify was built around a simple question: what if these devices were not treated as waste at all?
Today, the Gurugram-based company buys, refurbishes and resells smartphones and other electronics, while also running buyback and recycling operations. It sits in a category often described as re-commerce, which is extending the life of devices through repair and resale rather than pushing them out of the consumption cycle. The company, which crossed Rs 1,000 crore in revenue last year and is preparing for an eventual public listing, arrived at that model only after multiple changes in direction.
Its founders, Mandeep Manocha and Nakul Kumar, did not start out trying to build a refurbished-device marketplace. The original idea was closer to waste management. “The journey began with a focus on waste management and e-waste,” Kumar said. “The more time we spent in that space, the clearer one thing became: electronics were not really ‘waste’.”
The two first met while studying engineering at Panjab University. Manocha was studying chemical engineering while Kumar was pursuing electronics and communication. After college, they briefly worked in investment banking and consulting, but the idea of building a company drew them away.
Before Cashify, they separately experimented with waste-management ventures. Those attempts did not last, but the lessons stayed.
“The biggest lesson was that good intentions alone don’t make a good business,” Kumar said. “Garbage is not free. It costs money to collect, transport and process. Unless the economics work at every step, the business will not sustain.”
That lesson eventually shaped Cashify’s operating philosophy. The founders realised that execution mattered as much as the idea itself. Building a business around used devices turned out to involve far more than matching buyers and sellers.
Full-Stack Marketplace Pivot
“Re-commerce may seem simple from the outside, but it is very execution-heavy,” Kumar said. The company would eventually move through several iterations. Since launching in 2013, it shifted from waste management to e-waste, from B2B consulting to consumer buybacks, and later from a marketplace model to a full-stack structure where it buys, refurbishes and sells devices itself.
“This shift gave us much better control over quality and customer experience,” Manocha said.
The problem they were trying to solve became clearer over time. Selling an old device was usually cumbersome. Consumers did not know what price to expect, whom to trust or whether their personal data would remain secure. Yet many of these products still had usable life left.
The company sought to simplify that process through instant price estimates, doorstep pickup and standardised checks.
The concept itself may have looked straightforward, but building the business was less so. Hiring was difficult in the early years because refurbished electronics did not appear to be an attractive category. “You are talking about second-hand devices, logistics and refurbishment,” Kumar said. “It wasn’t something that immediately excited people.”
The early team operated without fixed roles. Problems changed every day: pricing one week, pickups the next.
Raising money was equally challenging. Investors were still trying to understand the category, while the founders themselves were discovering what the model would ultimately become. In 2015, the company secured its first institutional funding from Bessemer Venture Partners and Blume Ventures. Investors including Amazon’s investment arm, Prosus and Trifecta Capital later joined, taking total funding to around $125 million. Some problems have persisted even as the business expanded. Consumer trust remains one of them.
“People are naturally sceptical about the value of old devices,” Kumar said. “If a price changes after inspection, even for a valid reason, it can feel inconsistent from the customer’s point of view.”
Part of the challenge lies in the nature of the product itself. A device’s actual condition often becomes clear only after physical inspection, creating a gap between expectations and assessment.
Solving the Trust Deficit
Meanwhile, the business has widened beyond online channels. Cashify is now expanding its offline presence across 95 cities, betting that physical stores can address some of the trust deficit that digital channels alone cannot. “As the category matured, it became clear that offline could solve for trust and access in a deeper way,” Manocha said.
For a company that started by examining what happens to discarded electronics, the larger idea remained consistent even as the model changed repeatedly, that old devices often have more life left in them than consumers assume. The challenge was building a system around that belief.