The Day a Computer Engineer Traded Code for the Service Floor
Before Autoflow was a line of code, it was a problem co-founder Dhruv Kutmutia experienced... very personally.
With a master's in Computer Engineering, Dhruv knew how things should connect. But he wanted to experience the real world of automotive operations. So, he didn't go to observe. He didn't visit for a day.
He took a full-time job for three months as a Service Advisor at a high-volume, multi-brand service center.
Imagine this: A software engineer on the floor, suddenly responsible for 20 vehicle intake forms, 30 impatient customers, and coordination across five different technician teams. It didn't take long for him to realize that the most complicated part of a car wasn't the engine. It was the workshop itself.
While Dhruv was surviving the chaos of the shop floor firsthand, I was looking at the bigger picture: how could a business operate with so much friction when design and smart workflows could make it effortless? When Dhruv shared what he was witnessing every day, it was clear that the industry didn't just have an operational headache — it had a massive visibility and communication gap.
What struck us wasn't how hard it was to fix a car, but how agonizingly difficult it was to keep everything running in sync.
The floor was a beautiful chaos of wasted time:
- 🚗 The "Phantom Bay" Problem: Vehicles waited in line while expensive service bays sat perfectly empty.
- 👨🔧 The Silent Handoff: A technician would finish an incredible 3-hour job... and absolutely nobody knew. The car just sat there.
- 🕵️♂️ Where's Waldo? (Car Edition): Getting an update on whether a customer's car was "in paint," "in washing," or "still waiting" meant a full-day athletic expedition, constant walkie-talkie shouting, and a deep, existential dread when a customer called for a "5-minute update."
Together, we realized this wasn't about people not doing their jobs well. It was about great people working completely blind, forced to fight for the basic information they needed to succeed. While Dhruv knew the agony of being an overwhelmed service advisor, I knew how we could design a solution to streamline those complex workflows into something clear, intuitive, and connected.
"There has to be a better way to connect all of this," we agreed — probably while Dhruv was still running after a moving tow truck. We set out to build a single view — one place to see every vehicle, every bay, every job, and every handoff in real time.
That vision became Autoflow.
We're not just building software; we're building it for the people who are the business. We're combining deep, real-world workshop context with thoughtful design to erase the daily friction. We're on a mission to make automotive operations simpler, more visible, and, above all, better connected.
