When Subrat Pani and Gagan Maini sat down in 2011 to figure out what kind of company they wanted to build, they didn’t start with a product. They started with a question: what do people worry about between the moment they wake up and the moment they go back to bed?”We called it anxiety mapping,” Pani says. “We researched customers around what are their worries and anxiety in a day-to-day life.
The exercise surfaced a long list — caring for kids, caring for ageing parents, appliances breaking down, commuting on time, financial safety, career growth. But one theme kept resurfacing: fear of fraud, and the stress of sudden, unexpected events that could cause financial damage. Both founders came from the payments and credit card industry,where card fraud and counterfeiting were actively holding back adoption. That was the opening.”One insight in our mind was to get into the whole protection space — to give complete peace of mind,” Pani explains. “That was the first consumer insight.”From there, the idea narrowed quickly. If the goal was peace of mind, what should the company protect first? The answer was almost embarrassingly simple: the two things nobody leaves home without.
You always carry your wallet and your phone,” he says. “If any of these two go missing,you’re literally busy figuring out and worried about a lot of things.” Wallet and phone protection became OneAssist’s entry products — and gave the company its name: onestop, for assistance – OneAssist.
A BANKER’S ROUTE INTO A CATEGORY THAT DIDN’T EXIT
Pani resume reads unusually for a consumer-assistance founder. Before OneAssist, he spent roughly 12 years in retail banking and four in consumer marketing — starting with Godrej appliances in Kerala, then Arvind Mills during the launch of its Ruff & Tuff denim line, before moving into financial services with SBI Cards in 1998, where he first met Gagan Maini.Stints at ICICI Bank and Kotak Mahindra followed.
“Normally, when you work in a particular industry, you start solving problems associated with that industry,” he says. “Our journey is a little different.” The category OneAssist eventually built — consumer protection and assistance — didn’t exist yet in India. What carried over from his banking years wasn’t domain-specific knowledge so much instead: smartphone adoption was accelerating, Android was scaling fast, and data privacy, device theft, and digital payments were about to become large, messy categories. “Our vision was around how do you reduce the fear and make customers comfortable about these products and services, by providing them complete one-stop assistance and protection.”
FROM WALLETS TO WARDROBES: A COMPANY THAT KEEPS REDRAWING ITS OWN BOUNDARIES
Fifteen years and roughly three crore (30 million) customers later, the anxieties have multiplied — and so has OneAssist’s product line. Pani is candid that the company doesn’t consider its scope limited.
“Every household now — even your personal consumption basket — the whole density of appliances and devices has gone manifold,” he says, pointing to smartwatches,earbuds, IoT devices, home appliance and a general upgrade cycle that keeps shrinking. “A 32-inch TV five years back was a large segment. Now it’s 48, now 55 — tomorrow maybe 80 inches.”
The expansion has followed that curve deliberately: IoT and wearables protection post-2020, furniture protection in 2023, fashion and footwear protection last year (covering accidental damage and warranty issues on expensive branded goods), and, most recently, extended warranty for passenger vehicles. “Right now, what we are continuously looking at is what products and services are getting into consumers’ lives,and how do we bring in new, innovative protection solutions,” he says. “It’s going to be a continuous journey with an evolving modern lifestyle”
BETTING ON THE CULTURE BEFORE THE MARKET COULD REWARD IT
Ask Pani what protected OneAssist through its hardest stretches, and he doesn’t point to a product pivot or a funding round — he points to culture, which he calls unbearable design. “Culture is not like financial results. It cannot be measured in numbers rupees or KPIs,” he says. “It’s built consistently over a long period of time. It takes time to build a good culture & a great time”.
His framing is unusually direct for a founder: since OneAssist has had to invent solutions no one had built before, the company needed a workplace where people could stay focused on customers “without worrying about the politics, the bureaucracy, the other processes that slow down any large corporate.” His conviction, as he puts it, is simple —”you can’t give great customer experience if your employee experience is poor.”Ownership over excuses, encouragement to fail and find solutions anyway, and consistency in how employees are treated are the pieces he credits most.
AI AS THE NEW DIFFERENTIATOR
Technology has always been foundational at OneAssist — Pani calls it the company’s”moat” for operating across a thousand-plus cities and a growing list of categories, from furniture to eyewear to cyber fraud. But the emphasis has sharpened. “This financial year, we are working on AI-first — across the whole org — trying to build that into the DNA,” he says. The company’s internal hackathons take real consumer problems and hand them to teams to solve with data and AI. The example he offers is concrete: a claims process that used to take two days now resolves in ten seconds.
The payoff shows up in customer sentiment, he says, citing OneAssist’s roughly 75,000+ Google reviews at a 4.7 rating and around 40,000 Amazon reviews at 4.6 — numbers he argues are rare for any company sitting at “the interplay of services and insurance.”
WHAT HE TELLS EARLY-STAGE FOUNDERS
As an angel investor — self-described as “not a very traditional” one — Pani says he value founders before products. “The founder is the most important asset for very early-stage companies,” he says. He looks for domain depth, genuine understanding of the problem, and critically validation of the need gap. “You might build a great product and be very excited about it as a founder, but do westerns really need it and willing to pay for it?” His filter comes down to three questions: Is the market large enough? Are you solving a problem that actually matters to the consumer? And are early adopters genuinely loving the product and willing to buy more.
THE NEXT FIVE YEARS
OneAssist’s origins were financial protection; today, Pani describes the company’s territory as “anything which is of importance or value” in a household. His read on the market is straightforward: Indian consumers are upgrading their lifestyle — more premium smartphones, more appliances per home, shorter upgrade cycles — and every one of those purchases creates a new anxiety worth solving for. Having grown from one crore to three crore customers in roughly three to four years, company is betting the next phase of growth comes from depth, not just reach: “Today we’re protecting one appliance at a home, but in the same home there are at least 10 to 11 devices and appliances.”
OFF THE CLOCK
Asked how he balances building a large organisation with visibly maintaining his fitness,his yoga practice, and family time, Pani pushes back on the premise. “It’s the other way around,” he says. “I’m able to manage all these things because I’m doing all these things.” His argument: new skills and experiences refresh the mind and generate the energy needed to lead well, rather than competing with it. “To run a company effectively,you need to manage your self well emotions, your energy, your learning. When you’re in a good frame of mind, you create beautiful things and find solutions to difficult problems easily.”
Subrat Pani is the Co-founder of OneAssists Consumer Solution, headquartered in Mombai.