Nathan Hecht went looking for a car and came back with a software problem. He had spent hours trying to arrange a lease in New York. The number he wanted was straightforward enough: what would this vehicle cost him each month? Getting an answer, and getting a car on terms he wanted, turned out to be separate undertakings. He went home without the car. For the dealership, this was an unsuccessful sale. For Hecht, it became the beginning of Honcker, the business later called Rodo.
The irritation was ordinary. His response involved starting a company. During the dealership experience, he had searched for a way to complete the same task online. He could find information, but the transaction itself remained elusive. A person could spend an afternoon on the internet researching a car and still have an afternoon of negotiations ahead. Hecht wanted the phone to carry more of the burden.
By the time he entered automotive retail, he had already worked on electronics, virtual currency and software for sharing files that could disappear. Cars were another industry to learn. The recurring question was familiar: why did a person have to surrender so much control just to get something done?
An unusual route to the showroom
Hecht grew up in Forest Hills, Queens, in an Orthodox Jewish family. In the late 1990s, he encountered Jerusalem’s developing technology sector. He later returned to New York and built businesses including Components International, Kurrenci and Dstrux. The route into car leasing came through those ventures, rather than through a career selling vehicles.
Dstrux offers a useful glimpse of his interests before Rodo. Its web platform launched in April 2014, followed by an iOS announcement that August. The proposition was that sending a file should leave the sender with choices about who could see it and how long it remained available. The company advertised permissions and self-destructing content, carrying the idea of temporary sharing beyond a photograph.
Hecht’s concern was the permanence people had come to accept online. Sharing was easy; retaining authority over the material afterward was much harder. Dstrux tried to give that authority a set of controls. It was an ambitious promise, and it placed the product in the middle of the relationship between a sender and a recipient.
A car marketplace would place him between two parties again. This time the thing being exchanged was considerably harder to delete.
The dealer gets a seat at the table
Honcker began piloting in 2016. Hecht developed it with co-founders including Amir Lahav and Zorah Anapolsky. Its approach gave existing dealerships a central role: their vehicles appeared in the marketplace, and they continued to determine the terms of the deals. Hecht had disliked the experience of visiting a dealership, yet his company needed dealerships to work.
That choice shaped the sales pitch. A dealer could receive a customer much closer to a completed transaction, with a particular vehicle selected and application information supplied. The customer could compare options and see a personalized payment without repeating the same conversation at several desks. Both sides had an interest in spending less time getting to an answer.
By December 2017, the network included more than 300 dealerships. Hecht described asking them about their difficulties and designing around the answers. Dealers could choose how to present pricing and whether to offer finance and insurance products through the app. The software had to accommodate the businesses using it.
“To bring the new car transaction online.”
Nathan Hecht, describing his company goal in 2020
The customer relationship remained with the dealer. That was a meaningful commitment in an industry where a new intermediary might otherwise look like a threat. Hecht was offering another route to the sale, with the dealership still there when the car reached its new driver.
The arithmetic behind a swipe
The early service let shoppers browse nearby inventory, obtain personalized lease pricing and order a vehicle through the app. Delivery was part of the proposition; contemporary descriptions included free delivery within 25 miles of a participating dealer. The intended experience could be explained quickly. Producing it required more than placing photographs of cars on a screen.
A lease payment depends on the specific vehicle and the terms available to a specific customer. Taxes, fees, incentives and existing obligations complicate the calculation. An attractive price is useful only if the transaction can proceed on the basis of it. Hecht’s original frustration gave the company a demanding standard to meet.
In September 2019, Honcker became Rodo while introducing its own core pricing technology. The engine’s name, RICE, stood for Rebates, Incentives, Coupons Engine. Hecht said its development had taken a team of 35 people nine months. The system processed automotive information to produce customized payments and gave Rodo more control over the calculations it had previously partly licensed.
The name change therefore came with work beneath the surface. Customers could have fees, taxes and remaining lease payments incorporated into a deal. The interface was meant to make the arithmetic visible. For a founder whose automotive career began with difficulty getting a monthly number, owning the machinery that produced that number was a consequential step.
One transaction leads to another
The business also expanded around what customers already owned. In April 2019, Honcker announced an integration with Carvana that let users obtain an offer on an existing vehicle and arrange a new lease through the same platform. Selling the old car and finding the next one could be treated as connected tasks.
This was a practical extension of Hecht’s original idea. A shopper rarely arrives with a completely blank slate. There may be a car to sell, a lease to exit or money tied up in the previous vehicle. The app needed to meet that person somewhere in the middle of an existing arrangement.
Capital helped support the work. Honcker announced a $3.6 million seed round in 2017 and raised approximately $23 million from IAC in its 2018 Series A. In July 2021, Rodo announced another $18 million, bringing its reported total funding to $45 million. Holman and Evolution led that Series B, with participation from IAC, Kevin Hart’s HartBeat Ventures and automotive industry investors.
The mix of backers suited the company’s position between software and car retailing. The announced use of the money included expanding the dealer network and acquiring customers. Building the product and finding people willing to transact through it remained connected jobs.
Eight words, and a small joke
Hecht can be concise about the ambition. Asked in 2020 to describe his company’s goal, he used eight words: to bring the new car transaction online. Asked about his biggest career influence, he credited his wife and her support for his ventures. Asked for something that would surprise his employees, he briefly promoted himself to champion boxer, then supplied the necessary correction: he was kidding.
Other details soften the executive outline. His children helped devise the original name Honcker. In a 2019 account, he described family calls reaching him at the office and religious study accompanying his commute. Work occupied considerable space, but he spoke about family and faith as commitments with their own claims on his time.
His Cars Yeah appearances add a reading recommendation: The Idiot, by Fyodor Dostoevsky. A founder trying to simplify transactions recommending a long Russian novel is a pleasing complication. He also named the difficulty of balancing work and life during Rodo’s early years. The public description of his motivation included enjoyment of solving a problem and a wish to contribute to the community.
The car still comes with paper
In September 2023, Hecht announced Cario’s vehicle-title platform. The new venture, spun out of Rodo, followed the automotive transaction into another dependency. A buyer and seller might agree on the car and its price, yet ownership still needed to be transferred through a system involving titles, lenders and state agencies.
Cario proposed turning the title into a digital asset, supported by distributed ledger technology. Its announced scope included title transfer, adding and releasing liens, registration and vehicle management. The ambition required participation from several institutions, each with responsibilities that a consumer-facing app could not simply wave away.
In a Nashville television interview, Hecht acknowledged the bureaucracy involved in getting large state departments to change. Tennessee officials described their own early research into electronic titling. That distinction matters to the story: a company can propose a faster process while the public bodies responsible for ownership records are still considering how it should work.
- Choose the carHoncker / Rodo
- Calculate the dealRodo pricing engine
- Transfer the titleCario
A diagram of Hecht’s product focus, rather than a claim that every step is available in every state.
The next thing holding up the deal
Cario continued advocating its model in February 2025, describing a system free for state governments with costs borne by dealers and lenders. In February 2026, Indiana’s independent automobile dealers association featured its digital-title-transfer service among preferred partnerships. AUTOVATE’s 2026 speaker listing identified Hecht as founder and CEO of both Rodo and Cario.
Cario’s website now presents a digital title network alongside an AI titling agent for administrative workflows. A payment settlement network is described as coming soon. These are extensions into the work surrounding ownership: forms, exceptions, coordination and eventually the movement of money. Each adds another participant whose part of the transaction must make sense.
Hecht began as a customer who wanted an answer about a car. His subsequent work has kept moving through the steps required to deliver one. First came the choice and the price, then the connected transactions, then the ownership record. The vehicle may travel from the dealership to the driveway in an afternoon. Getting everything around it to move together has furnished him with years of work.