Narain Karthikeyan, India's 1st F1 Driver, Built a Successful Startup in 3 Years

Narain Karthikeyan, India's first Formula 1 driver, now runs a business that refurbishes bikes and employs 250 people.

How Narain Karthikeyan, India’s 1st F1 Driver, Built a Successful Startup in Just 3 Years Narain Karthikeyan, India's first Formula 1 race car driver, now runs a business of refurbished bikes, which employs around 250 people and is backed by approximately $11 million in funding.

In November 2019, Narain Karthikeyan, the first-ever Indian Formula 1 driver and a standout figure in the world of Indian motorsports, was competing in Fuji, Japan, at the Super GT x DTM Dream Race for the Honda-backed Moduko Nakajima Racing team.

After winning the race, Narain thought he would come back to the team and compete the following year since he had another year left on his contract. Although Narain would compete again at the Asian Le Mans Series for Racing Team India in 2021, the pandemic triggered a long-held desire—to become an entrepreneur.

And if I ever ventured into putting a business together, it had to be related to automobiles,” Narain explains in a conversation with The Better India. Backed by this vision, we started DriveX Mobility, a brand-agnostic mobility platform in the pre-owned two-wheeler category that caters to different needs of the affordable mobility sector in India.

Incorporated in April 2020, DriveX Mobility claims to provide “top quality refurbished two-wheelers to customers and allows them to buy two-wheelers at reasonable prices”. Elaborating on their decision to buy a stake in DriveX, Sudarshan Venu, Managing Director at TVS, said in a press release, “The pre-owned two-wheeler market is largely unorganized today.

Narain and his team have built a unique platform that can scale up quickly. Employing around 250 people, delivering 2,500 units a month (from 15 in August 2020), and acquiring external funding of about $11 million over two rounds, DriveX has risen very quickly. Narain Karthikeyan Formula 1 race car driver and now the founder of DriveX.

But did he ever envision becoming a professional race car driver competing in Formula 1? After a career in race car driving, why did he decide to venture into pre-owned two-wheelers of all things?

“As a business, the opportunity for two-wheelers, especially in the pre-owned space, is very large in India. It’s about one and a half times the size of the new two-wheeler market.

But this pre-owned vehicle two-wheeler space has largely been transacted through an unorganized broker network. For customers, we add a lot of value to these pre-owned two-wheeler bikes. We give customers wanting to purchase a pre-owned vehicle an experience of a new two-wheeler,” claims Narain.

“In the last 10 years, a lot of digital platforms have evolved in the pre-owned four-wheeler market. We took the right decision to get into pre-owned two-wheelers or else we would have been one amongst the 20 players selling cars.

DriveX sources pre-owned two-wheelers from C2B (customer-to-business) and B2B (business-to-business) channels. After sourcing, these pre-owned two-wheelers make their way to the startup’s in-house refurbishing factories in Hosur and Coimbatore.

At the level one inspection itself, we know exactly what parts to acquire and our just-in-time inventory management system helps us a lot in achieving a quick turnaround. Not too long ago, Narain claims that this process from sourcing to putting out these refurbished vehicles in the market took about 90 days per vehicle.

What has also helped Narain is his ability to leverage his nearly three-decade-long experience as a professional motorsport athlete into this business. These are pre-owned two-wheelers that require servicing. Given a growing shift to electric vehicles (EVs) in India, Narain believes that DriveX will eventually pivot to pre-owned two-wheeler EVs.

correspondent by: