Ever wondered how difficult and tiresome it used to be for your parents or their parents to sell a car, to find a suitable buyer ready to pay a suitable price, and not keep wondering,
“What if I waited for someone else, might have gotten a few thousand more”.
If not you, Amit Jain and Anurag Jain did wonder, which eventually led them on a path to find a Unicorn we all know, CarDekho.com
Well, those days are now things of the past, because the future generations won’t have to hustle anymore, at least in the matter of selling cars because they have services like Car Dekho at their disposal, ready to fix them a buyer in minimum time and getting them the maximum rates possible for their vehicles.
Car Dekho was founded back in 2008, to solve the problem of most of us, buying and selling used cars without any hassle. This industry was very much scattered at the time. Although there have always been local resellers, working on a small and unorganized scale, there wasn’t any strong competition on the national level. Car Dekho debuted on the national level doing things in an organized manner which made them seem authentic (which they were) and gain the public’s trust in supposedly lesser time than an unorganized reseller takes. The brothers, hailing from the state capital of Rajasthan, established their headquarters in Pink City itself. Being one of the firsts in the Automotive E-commerce sector, the company gained popularity.
Fast Forward to 2021, Car Dekho’s revenue was 884.4 Cr in FY21 i.e., $108.04 M, they have taken an aggregate of $497.5 M in funding which has taken their evaluation to a whopping $1.2 B.
But, as they always say, statistics always look good on paper but rarely anyone knows the sweat and blood that goes into bringing those numbers onto the sheet. The two brothers, Amit and Anurag, both IITians left their jobs and returned to their hometown, Jaipur, and decided against doing the family business. What they did was start an IT outsourcing company named GirnarSoft. The company was established, but nonetheless, the journey was challenging. When the going gets tough, the tough get going, keeping it in mind they started to send emails in hopes of getting better and bigger clients, sending out billions of emails, making hundreds and thousands of calls, and ultimately getting their first client.
This did not make them huge profits, but it helped them secure more projects. Soon they saved up enough to hire more employees and start their own project. Even after Car Dekho gained momentum, they did not shut down the IT consultancy services company as it was the primary source of income.
Car Dekho grew leaps and bounds and by January 2012 had served 3.4 Cr visitors. The company launched its iOS app a month after the Android launch, getting 100K downloads within the first 30 days.
By 2014, the number of unique visitors had doubled and revenue had increased three-fold. The company expanded into other sectors by launching BikeDekho, PriceDekho and MobileDekho, CollegeDekho and had a team of 600 employees.
The company claims to be working with 4,000 new auto dealerships and 3,000 used car dealers across the country. It is also stated that the company has collaborated with over 10 financial institutions and 18 insurance companies PAN India. CarDekho launched offline stores named Gaadi in January 2019 after acqui-hiring Carbiqui. Initially, 8-10 Gaadi stores were opened in the NCR area, which grew to about 60 outlets across the nation.
All the sectors had to shift to the online mode sooner than later during the COVID period and the automobile industry was no exception to it. Those who could not be left behind, particularly the offline retailers as the imposition of the Lockdown brought their businesses relatively to nil. This is why the company later decided to shift to the home inspection model and decided to shut down about 40% of Gaadi stores mainly in the Delhi NCR, Faridabad, Ghaziabad, Mumbai, Pune, and Bengaluru areas by October 2021. The company has grown substantially with a 67.4% jump of about 489 Cr in FY21 which was around 292 Cr in FY20.
Though CarDekho has a bunch of competitors now in the form of Cars24, Droom, Quikr, OLX, and Mahindra First Choice Wheels and is riddled with debt, the company’s future looks bright as it still is the undisputed king of the market with its unique features like ‘Feel the car tool’, ‘360 degree interior/exterior views’, and situations playing in its favor as COVID proved to be a blessing in disguise as the offline businesses could not compete with the online services.
To conclude, we can say, CarDekho initially began as a Soch, Vishwas (thought, belief), and is now… well we know what it is now.
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