Kevin
Singerman

Kevin Singerman keeps a detail in his pitch decks that tends to land with the people who count: the average American spends 4.3 hours buying a car. Most of that time is not spent looking at cars. It is spent in the finance office - filling out forms, waiting on credit checks, negotiating payment terms that get recalculated on a whiteboard three times before anyone signs anything. Singerman founded AutoFi in 2015 to make that specific experience stop.

AutoFi is not a dealership. It is not a lender. It is the connective tissue that lets both talk to each other in real time - routing a customer's credit application to the right lender at the right rate, in the time it takes to shake someone's hand. Today, the platform processes over 1 million automotive financing requests a year, resulting in more than $3 billion in vehicle sales. Nearly 80% of applications sent through the platform get approved.

That approval rate is not an accident. It is an architecture decision. Singerman and his co-founders Mandar Gokhale and Jonathan T. Palan built AutoFi around intelligent lender routing - a system that reads a customer's profile and instantly identifies which lender in the network is most likely to approve them, at the best terms. Chase Auto Finance, Bank of America, Santander, Huntington, Ford Motor Credit, Toyota Financial Services - they are all connected, and AutoFi is the switchboard.

The business case writes itself once you see the numbers. AutoFi's showroom solution compresses the average finance office visit from roughly 90 minutes to under 30. For a dealership running 150 deals a month, that is thousands of hours returned to the floor each year - and an incremental back-end profit of over $400 per deal. The 2024 platform expansion pushed those results even further, delivering a 70% reduction in deal completion time across the network.

Singerman's path to this problem was not obvious. He studied Finance at the University of Texas at Austin - straightforward enough - but then spent time at Shanghai Jiao Tong University studying Mandarin Chinese, which is either a detour or the kind of global curiosity that makes you see industries differently. He went into investment banking at Deutsche Bank and Stephens Inc., then into enterprise software at SunGard, then into venture at Activant Capital, then into marketplace lending at LendingClub as VP of Corporate Development.

That last stop mattered. LendingClub in 2014-2015 was still near the apex of its reinvention story - the idea that you could disintermediate legacy banks with a platform connecting borrowers and lenders directly. Singerman absorbed that framework and applied it one lane to the left: not consumer loans, but auto loans; not P2P, but dealer-to-lender. AutoFi's architecture borrows LendingClub's logic and places it inside the car dealership showroom.

AutoFi raised its $85M Series C in March 2022, led by Santander Holdings USA, SVB Financial Group, and Crosslink Capital - with BMW i Ventures and Mouro Capital among the backers. The round valued the company at $700 million. By that point, AutoFi had already logged four consecutive years of 100% revenue growth. The capital was earmarked for engineering, customer success, and market expansion.

The OEM partnerships reflect the depth of AutoFi's penetration into the industry's upper tiers. Acura, Audi, BMW, Ford, GM, Honda, and Hyundai all run programs on the platform. The logic for each OEM is the same as for dealerships: more approvals, faster closings, better customer satisfaction scores. In February 2024, Mitsubishi Motors launched ClickShop 2.0 on AutoFi's infrastructure. In April 2025, AutoFi announced a strategic integration with DriveCentric CRM, connecting the sales process end-to-end.

What Singerman has built, at its core, is a platform that converts a confrontation into a conversation. The car dealership - for decades the battleground between salespeople who know invoice prices and customers who don't - becomes a place where financing options are real-time, readable, and comparable. The customer wins on transparency. The dealer wins on throughput. The lender wins on volume. In fintech terms, that is a rare three-sided market where all three sides actually benefit.

The platform now integrates with the major dealer management systems - CDK Global, Reynolds & Reynolds, DealerTrack, AutoMate, and DealerBuilt - which means adoption does not require a dealership to replace its existing infrastructure. AutoFi plugs in. Results follow. At AutoFi's NADA Show 2026 appearance in Las Vegas, Singerman appeared alongside JB Burnett of Preston Automotive Group to discuss what real-world performance looks like from the dealership side.

Singerman has been quiet about the personal dimensions of his career - no splashy profiles, no TED stage appearances, no conspicuous social media presence under his own name. He runs a company that is, by design, invisible to the end consumer. AutoFi does not appear on the car window sticker. It does not appear in the television commercial. It appears in the finance office, at the moment when a $35,000 decision gets made in a room with fluorescent lighting. That is a hard product to make sexy. Singerman makes it fast instead, and fast turns out to be the sexier quality.

With 210 employees operating out of 548 Market Street in San Francisco, AutoFi sits at the intersection of two industries - automotive and financial services - that are both overdue for simplification. Singerman has spent a decade building the bridge between them. The company's trajectory suggests the other side is closer than it looks.