GoMechanic's founders inflated revenue for years — and told investors themselves

GoMechanic was a Gurgaon startup that connected car owners with local garages, backed by Sequoia Capital, Tiger Global and others, and by early 2023 one of India's best-known auto-services platforms. On 18 January 2023 its four co-founders — Amit Bhasin, Kushal Karwa, Nitin Rana and Rishabh Karwa — published a statement admitting that the numbers had been invented.

The admission listed the mechanisms: revenue knowingly overstated, growth figures falsified through round-tripping, money shown as coming from partner garages that may not have existed, and customer and partner counts inflated. The investors ordered a forensic audit by EY. Within days the company had laid off about 70% of its 1,100 to 1,200 staff.

The case became India's textbook example of startup governance failure — not because the fraud was large, but because it was ordinary: revenue recognition pulled forward, related-party transactions dressed as growth, and a board that learned about it from the founders' confession rather than from its own controls. The company that remained was a fraction of the one the investors had funded.