Smartphone repair service Save raises €15 Million to repair all your broken gadgets

Smartphones. They break. What else is there to say? Just over two years ago, then student Damien Morin decided to change the way smartphone repair worked, and launched Save (formerly Savemysmartphone), a smartphone repair service that would bring transparency to the market. Previously, smartphone repair was done in shoddy locations, and the quality and trust was minimal.
Save provides transparent prices (provided on their website based on type of repair: “faulty battery” “broken screen”), whether you mail in your phone, have a courier pick it up, or walk into one of their 300 retail locations in France. There is also a 1-year guarantee on repairs, which explains why the company has gone from 20,000€ to 1.3 Milllion € in monthly revenue in the past 24 months. Of course, margins are a different question, and the 300 employees that are trained and repairing smartphones certainly have an associated cost. Still, Save has grown quickly, and is already active in Switzerland and Sweden, according to LesEchos, who first announced the startups’s €15 Million fundraising from IDInvest, 360 Capital, Xavier Niel and others.
Save may be focusing in smartphone for now; however, if the IoT growth expectations are to be believed, there will quickly be more connected gadgets that aren’t smartphones than that are, meaning, for the most popular gadgets (Nest, Netatmo, Withings), repair needs will grow. How Save will prioritize gadget selection will likely be driven by demand; however, with the numbers they are seeing, Save has a good chance to be the next Geek Squad for sure, including potential acquisition by retail players like FNAC or Best Buy.
The news and the company’s future is being discussed later today at Save’s keynote (which you can view online here). Save is the latest startup to be taken under the wing of TheFamily, which increasingly tends to focus the bulk of its energy for a short period of time on one startup. Mindie, Tok Tok Tok & Algolia are all veterans of this special treatment.