Transforming the automobile trade

CarDekho Group is changing the way cars are bought and sold and has been seeding ideas for future growth, which has helped achieve CAGR of 70% YoY for the last ten years.

Set up in 2008 by brothers Amit and Anurag Jain under Grinar Software, an IT outsourcing company they had founded a year before, CarDekho has evolved to become a unicorn in October 2021.

The Series E funding of $250 Million was led by private investment firm LeapFrog Investments, along with South Korea’s Mirae Asset Group and other existing investors. The overall valuation of CarDekho Group is now $1.2 Billion.

“It all started after we visited the Auto Expo in 2008,” says Anurag Jain, COO and Cofounder of the group, adding that they realised that there was a clear lack of information on cars and their features, which made it difficult for consumers to research and take an informed buying decision.

“The early version of CarDekho focused on providing content that was easy to navigate and enabled enthusiasts to research different cars. This also made it easy for buyers to find cars to suit their needs and budget. This unlocked a lot of businesses as we gained eyeballs, enabling us to monetise through classifieds, B2C campaigns, and lead generation initiatives,” he explains.

The CarDekho Group currently operates auto portals such as CarDekho.com, Gaadi. com, ZigWheels.com, BikeDekho.com, and PowerDrift.com. Besides, it offers customers avenues for selling and buying used cars and provides financial services, including car and health insurance and automobile finance.

CarDekho was one of the first companies to design and offer products for financing pre-owned cars, which traditionally has been an unstructured market with a low focus on financial institutions due to the hassles of product valuation and paperwork.

Enabling the ecosystem

As part of its initiative to provide an immersive online experience to users, CarDekho offers a 360-degree interior and exterior view with the sound of the car and explanations of features with videos through its Feel the Car tool. Its website and app provide expert reviews, and tools for search and comparison of vehicles by make, model, price, and features of all car brands and models available in India.

It also enables the selling of used cars through classifieds. The CarDekho classified allows users to upload their cars for sale, and find used cars for buying from individuals and used car dealers. The company has tie-ups with several auto manufacturers, including over 4,000 car dealers and several financial institutions to facilitate the purchase of vehicles. This also helps the company provide live offers and promotions across cities.

Having developed solutions and innovative processes for inspection and evaluation of cars to the assessment of buyers’ financial capabilities and inventory management, CarDekho provides techenabled tools to manufacturers and car dealers.

These include apps for dealer sales executives to manage leads, cloud services for tracking sales performance, call tracker solutions, digital marketing support, a virtual online showroom, and outsourced lead management operational processes for taking consumers from inquiry to sale.

The platform also provides tools like chatbots and virtual assistants to help dealers address consumer queries.

“Our vision is to construct a complete ecosystem for consumers and car manufacturers, dealers, and related businesses such that consumers have easy and complete access to not only buying and selling cars but also manage their entire ownership experience, be it accessories, tyres, batteries, insurance or roadside assistance,” says Anurag.

As a group, CarDekho has been proactive in seeding ideas for future growth. “This is what has made us deliver a CAGR of 70% YoY for the last 10 years. We have been early entrants into Fintech and Insurtech specific to the auto industry which has led us closer to the unicorn milestone,” he points out.

Adding AI power

Technology is at the core of everything that CarDekho does and how it offers it. “What you see on the website is just the tip of the iceberg. Under the hood, we have built many technologies over the years to ease the car buying and owning experience. We have achieved this through analysis of the data points of users that come on the website,” says Anurag.

To begin with, the platform uses predictive analytics to analyse online browsing behaviour to provide relevant information and personalised offerings to improve the car buying experience. “A user generates over 70-80 signals that are absorbed by our personalisation engine to create our data lakes that help precisely understand consumer’s objectives and needs; it helps discover what is a better way for the user to consume content,” he informs.

The platform relies on leveraging big data that is analysed using artificial intelligence or AIenabled algorithm that takes into account different parameters and filters used by the consumer while