Nothing Grey About It: For Cashify, The Future Is Circular

IPO-bound Cashify is formalising India’s massive grey market for used smartphones by building a full-stack model focused on trust, quality control, and end-to-end ownership.

OEM partnerships and certified refurbishment are helping Cashify solve the trust deficit while securing better supply and creating a competitive moat over informal players and marketplaces.

Rising premium demand, higher ASPs, and improving repeat usage are driving growth, positioning Cashify to scale revenues and profitability ahead of its planned IPO.

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There is a particular kind of audacity required to walk into a market already owned by everyone and no one at once. India’s used smartphone trade, worth tens of thousands of crores and touching millions of lives, had for decades operated in the comfortable shadows of the grey market. 

Transactions happened often on street corners in Nehru Place, in cramped shops in Palika Bazaar, between strangers on WhatsApp groups and across counters where neither receipt nor warranty was ever a part of the deal. Nobody regulated it. Nobody trusted it completely. And yet, it worked in the way that all informal economies work, by filling a void that the formal world had neglected.

This was the world, a decade ago, into which walked Cashify. 

Founded by Mandeep Manocha, Nakul Kumar and Amit Sethi in 2013, Cashify started out with a simple but radical idea: what if buying a used smartphone could feel like buying a new one? 

At the time, this space was dominated by murky, trust-deficient second-hand sellers, but the startup wanted to replace this with something transparent, standardised, and backed by a warranty.

The idea was not new globally. Companies like Back Market in Europe, Swappa in the US have been pioneers in the electronic ‘recommerce’ space, but executing the model in India, with its sprawling informal supply chains, price-sensitive consumers, and deep-rooted distrust of “used” goods, was a different challenge entirely.

Today, Cashify stands on the cusp of proving........

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