How OneAssist’s AI Stack Is Giving Older Smartphones An Insured Future

India’s smartphone market may no longer be growing rapidly in unit terms (as per IDC’s May 2026 report), but consumers are spending more on their devices than ever before. As premium smartphone costs rise, up by 14% in Q1 of 2026 alone, handset protection is becoming less of an add-on and more of a necessity. 

Yet handset protection remains a largely underpenetrated market in India. While the global mobile handset protection industry is estimated to be worth $15.9 Bn, only about 10-12 Mn devices in India are covered by protection plans each year—equivalent to roughly 6-8% of annual smartphone sales. 

“For the industry, the next growth opportunity may lie beyond the traditional point-of-sale protection,” said Abhishek Maheshwari, CEO of Mumbai-based OneAssist, a startup that is betting on that opportunity with AI at the core.

Founded in 2011 as a wallet and device-protection startup, OneAssist operates across device protection, after-sales services, insurance and refurbished smartphones. Towards the end of 2025, the startup launched Hawk Eye, its AI-powered diagnostics platform for used smartphones that evaluates smartphone health and enables post-purchase protection plans.

According to the startup, Hawk Eye has been trained on tens of thousands of smartphone images and is capable of assessing devices across brands and age groups. OneAssist uses the system to determine whether a device qualifies for protection coverage. 

The technology works across brands and device ages, allowing OneAssist to offer protection plans on existing devices rather than only newly purchased ones. The platform uses techniques like object detection, video diagnostics, and OCR.

“Hawk Eye is currently processing around 5,000 devices a month. So far, more than 40,000 devices have been assessed through Hawk Eye, reducing assessment turnaround times from hours or days to just a few minutes,” Maheshwari told Inc42. 

OneAssist expects the Hawk Eye platform to assess more than 1 Lakh devices in FY27 as it expands across financial-inclusion, retail, and distribution channels.

Why OneAssist Made The AI Bet Now?

Once a device has been used for a few months, insurance companies and warranty providers have limited visibility into its condition, making it difficult to underwrite protection coverage.

As smartphone ownership cycles lengthened from around six months in 2016 to nearly 40 months today, OneAssist began receiving increasing requests from both consumers and channel partners for protection plans on devices that were already in use. The challenge was that the conventional window for purchasing handset protection, typically within six months of buying a phone, had already passed, explained Maheshwari.

With Hawk Eye, the startup now sees this as a much larger opportunity than traditional point-of-sale protection. While only a fraction of new smartphones sold every year carry protection plans, hundreds of millions of devices already in circulation remain uninsured and unprotected.

“Hawk Eye allows us to assess devices that are already in use and determine whether they can be covered. We think this can unlock a significant new market,” Maheshwari said. 

The startup is also working with new financial-inclusion partners and exploring opportunities to take the technology to other markets. According to the CEO, Hawk Eye has improved underwriting consistency through standardised digital assessments while significantly reducing onboarding friction, enabling near real-time policy issuance.

As a result, OneAssist’s HawkEye platform has helped the company expand into the fast-growing used and refurbished smartphone protection segment, onboard over 3,000 partners across retail and fintech ecosystems, and build a scalable underwriting framework for high-volume deployments. 

“The true north star of HawkEye is a 10-15% contribution to OneAssist’s revenue as compared to new smartphone protection in the next 12-18 months by taking it to the market through multiple GTM partners,” said Maheshwari. 

What Goes Into Scaling Up Refurbished Devices? 

While HawkEye is helping OneAssist expand protection coverage beyond newly purchased devices, the company believes the technology has a much larger role to play in adjacent smartphone lifecycle businesses. As consumers upgrade more frequently and trade-in programmes become commonplace, a growing number of premium devices are finding their way into the secondary market.

One of the biggest opportunities emerging from that shift is India’s rapidly growing refurbished smartphone market, where device assessment and trust remain critical challenges. Industry data reflects that shift. According to Counterpoint Research, India’s refurbished smartphone market grew 4.9% in the first half of 2025, extending a multi-year growth trajectory.

For OneAssist, trust remains the biggest gap in the market. While buyers may be attracted by the prospect of purchasing a premium smartphone at a steep discount, they often have limited visibility into the device’s condition, repair history or long-term reliability.

To address that challenge, the company recently launched Assure Shield, a certification and warranty programme for pre-owned devices. Smartphones sourced through retailers, refurbishers and trade-in channels undergo a 30-point Mobile Health Check. Devices that meet the required standards receive a OneAssist certification and are sold with a six-month warranty.

Unlike many marketplace-led models, OneAssist is positioning itself as an independent verification layer between buyers and sellers. The company argues that backing certification with warranty coverage helps create greater confidence in refurbished-device purchases.

“The programme is currently running at about 1,000 certifications a month, with the company targeting roughly 6,000 monthly certifications over the next three months,” said Maheshwari.

Devices Are The Start

Smartphones and personal electronics remain OneAssist’s largest business, contributing about 60% of revenue, followed by consumer durables at nearly 30% and financial solutions products at 10%.

Yet the company increasingly sees itself not as a device-protection provider, but as a technology-led assistance platform. Its core asset, according to Maheshwari, is the infrastructure that connects insurers, service partners, logistics networks and distribution channels. Once built for smartphones, that infrastructure is now being extended to adjacent categories including home appliances, furniture and digital protection services.

The expansion comes as India’s smartphone market matures and replacement cycles lengthen. At the same time, rising spare-part prices, supply-chain disruptions, currency fluctuations and higher logistics costs are increasing the cost of repairs, creating new opportunities for protection and lifecycle-management services.

Beyond devices, OneAssist now offers products such as UPI fraud protection, identity-theft assistance, dark-web monitoring and card-blocking support through banks, fintechs and lending partners. In May, the company also partnered with furniture and home décor retailer HomeTown to launch furniture protection plans, marking its entry into another large consumer category.

The strategy is supported by a stronger financial position. OneAssist has raised about ₹300 Cr in equity and another ₹100 Cr in debt, the latter helping fund its ₹174-Cr acquisition of identity and wallet-fraud protection company CPP India in 2025. In FY25, the company reported revenue of nearly ₹500 Cr, up more than 21% year-on-year, while posting a profit after tax of ₹3.55 Cr, compared with a loss of ₹1.63 crore a year earlier.

Competition remains intense. Rivals including Cashify, Servify, Grest, Onsitego and GoWarranty are also expanding beyond traditional warranty products into diagnostics, repair networks, trade-ins and lifecycle-management services. As smartphone ownership cycles stretch and device values rise, the race is increasingly shifting from selling protection at checkout to managing the entire lifecycle of consumer assets.

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