Sreevathsa Prabhakar Built Servify By Fixing What Others Ignored
How a service engineer turned after-sales chaos into a platform powering Apple, Samsung, and AT&T
The customer had locked the door.
It was 1999, and Sreevathsa Prabhakar, a fresh engineering graduate working as a service technician for BPL, stood trapped in a 100-square-foot house in Mumbai’s Dharavi. The man who’d bought an expensive television set was furious it wouldn’t turn on. He wanted his money back, and he wanted the owner of BPL to come personally. Sreevathsa was just a junior engineer who barely spoke Hindi.
He was almost about to hit me.
After two hours of pleading, the customer finally let him examine the TV. The problem? A loose cable connection. When the screen flickered to life, everything changed.
He went from wanting to hit me to offering me a drink. He even offered me money. That day, I realized something powerful: if you solve a customer’s problem, they will go out of their way to reward you.
Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.
Sreevathsa didn’t set out to be an entrepreneur. While his engineering classmates landed coveted software jobs at Infosys and TCS, he spent the late 1990s fixing televisions and refrigerators in customers’ homes across Mumbai. His territory included Dharavi, Sion, and Matunga. Not exactly the glamorous career his family had envisioned.
But those years taught him what MBA programs don’t: the economics of after-sales service, the psychology of frustrated customers, and the operational nuances that separate good service from fraud. He learned that service was always treated as a cost center, an afterthought in product companies focused on distribution and sales.
In 2009, after his father’s death and a callous comment from his Nokia supervisor, Sreevathsa quit corporate life and founded The Service Solutions (TSS). The concept was simple but novel for India: bring McDonald’s-style standardization to device repair. Apple became his first major client, trusting this unknown Indian entrepreneur to launch the country’s first Apple Care Center.
Apple is Apple because they really believed in the dream that I sold, saying, I will bring the Apple Store experience to India.
TSS scaled to 385 locations across India and the Middle East, managing service for Apple, Samsung, OnePlus, and HP. Revenue hit ₹160 crores with strong margins, all bootstrapped. But the journey nearly broke him.
When German conglomerate B2X offered to acquire TSS in 2014, the acquisition should have been the happy ending. Instead, it became the origin story for something bigger.
Device Protection Reimagined
Inside B2X’s German bureaucracy, Sreevathsa pitched an idea: what if device protection could be reimagined as a white-label technology platform instead of traditional insurance? The corporate answer was no. So he bought back his shares and started Servify in 2015.
The problem was obvious to anyone who’d bought electronics in India. Extended warranties existed, sold by insurance companies through retailers, but customer experience was terrible. Claim rejection rates hovered around 70%. Repairs took weeks.
Servify’s model flipped the equation. Instead of selling “Servify Care,” the company would power “AppleCare,” “Samsung Care Plus,” and “HP Complete Care” as the invisible orchestration layer. The customer sees only the brand they trust. Behind the scenes, Servify handles everything: distribution (onboarding 150,000 retail outlets), underwriting (partnering with insurers like ICICI Lombard), decisioning (AI-powered claim approval in real-time), and fulfillment (routing repairs to OEM service centers).
The economics work because everyone wins. On a ₹10,000 device protection plan, retailers keep 40-45%, OEMs get 10-15% royalty, insurance partners receive 25-28%, and Servify retains 12-15%. At scale, it’s a 15-18% EBITDA business.
How? By running almost entirely on software.
Our entire ops team, which manages all these claims and dealer onboarding, is about 15-18 people on a ₹2,000 crore business. Because we automated almost everything.
The platform now manages 740 million devices across 120+ product categories, processes 3 million transactions monthly, and serves 30 million users in multiple countries. The shift to global markets has been dramatic. International business now generates 70% of revenue, up from just 25% two years ago. The U.S. has become Servify’s largest market, followed by Europe and the Middle East.
The technology advantage is real. Servify holds over 20 patents, including video-based diagnostics that can assess device damage remotely. The platform integrates with OEM serial number databases to prevent fraud (a customer can’t claim warranty on a broken device bought secondhand), optimizes parts inventory across service networks, and uses confidence scores to monitor service center performance.
The Path to Public Markets
The company expects to raise $250-300 million at a valuation between $1.5-2.3 billion. Ahead of the IPO, Servify is finalizing a $100 million pre-IPO round that will officially crown it a unicorn.
The company has raised $165 million to date from investors including Iron Pillar, Blume Ventures, and DMI Sparkle Fund. Much of that capital went toward geographic expansion, regulatory licensing (device protection is a regulated business in most markets), and building integration infrastructure. A single telco partnership like AT&T requires integrating 7-8 different systems. Every new country requires fresh licenses and local compliance frameworks.
The financials show the inflection point arriving. FY24 revenue reached ₹759 crores, up 24% year-over-year. Net losses dropped 59% to ₹94 crores as operating leverage kicked in. FY25 is expected to be Servify’s first profitable year, with net revenue hitting ₹900 crores and 2-3% margins.
But Sreevathsa is explicit about playing a longer game. AT&T’s device protection program just launched and will take three years to ramp fully. Samsung’s consumer electronics division just went live. HP is expanding across countries. Apple, a client since 2008, continues adding markets where Servify powers AppleCare in regions without direct Apple retail presence.
This ₹900 crore net revenue will be at least ₹4,000 crores in the next few years. What will that valuation be? That’s what matters. In our business, I can’t value based on what is today.
The discipline extends beyond financial projections. Despite raising over $165 million, Servify operates with bootstrap-era frugality. Sreevathsa still recalls an incident where an employee exploited approval limits to place a $2 million parts order. His response? Make her personally negotiate with the supplier for a free return or pay out of pocket.
The DNA is like no wastage. I am okay to spend on celebrations or people, salaries. But where there is no need, there is no need.
The example: if you solve 9 customer tickets in under 2 minutes but one takes 5 hours, your average looks fine. But 10% of customers received failed service. Averages lie. Every customer interaction matters.
When Sreevathsa visits Apple Park in Cupertino and sees a “Welcome Servify” banner, he doesn’t see validation of past success. He sees proof that solving customer problems, even unglamorous ones in after-sales service, can build businesses that power the world’s most valuable brands.
The IPO will bring scrutiny, public market discipline, and governance requirements. Sreevathsa welcomes it.
An IPO isn’t a funding event. It’s a maturity event.
For a company born from a locked room in Dharavi, that kind of maturity has been 25 years in the making.
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