Overmars Jiang’s BMW came back from a service appointment in Germany with an unexpected instruction: return after another 30,000 kilometres. Jiang had been accustomed to a much shorter interval in China. He was sufficiently surprised that the mechanic showed him a checklist running to more than 200 items. The detail reassured him. It also gave him something to think about beyond his next oil change.
He later recalled the episode while explaining why he had entered the automotive aftermarket. The numbers belong to that particular recollection, rather than a universal rule about servicing cars. What stayed with him was the difference in the experience: someone could explain what had been done, and why. A repair bill becomes easier to accept when the customer can understand the work behind it.
There is an unusually modest starting point here for a technology company. A customer asks when to come back. A mechanic produces paperwork. The customer leaves with confidence. Jiang would eventually build a business around the much harder task of making that confidence travel through a supply chain.
From telecom networks to the garage
Before CassTime, Jiang spent nearly fifteen years at Huawei, joining in October 2000 and leaving in February 2015. He had graduated from Xiamen University with a bachelor’s degree in statistics that July. His work took him through research and development, marketing, sales and operations. His final Huawei position was general manager of the mobile transmission product line.
He also spent several years working in Germany. His career had therefore brought him into contact with two kinds of networks: the telecommunications systems he worked on, and the everyday arrangements that made a car repair feel dependable. The connection between those experiences is an interpretation of his career, but it helps explain the questions that recur in his public discussions of CassTime. Where does information stop? Who has to repeat a task? How can the next participant trust the result?
Jiang, also known by his Chinese name Jiang Yongxing, founded CassTime with a team in Shenzhen in 2015. The company dates its establishment to May 20. Among his early collaborators was Ben Chan, who had spent years in Berkeley and Silicon Valley and shared his interest in cars. Their conversations about differences in automotive service helped turn a personal frustration into a business proposition.
A garage can be full of highly capable people and still spend too long locating a component. Skill with a wrench does not automatically confer skill at navigating catalogues, decoding an unfamiliar part description or establishing whether a distant supplier has the right item. The practical appeal of Jiang’s project sits in that gap. A car on a lift has very little use for an eloquent procurement strategy.
The screw has to be the right screw
CassTime began by concentrating on parts for high-end vehicles. In an early interview, Jiang described that choice as an entry point into a wider ambition. The company wanted to establish a dependable way for businesses to transact across a complicated market. Starting with luxury vehicles gave it a defined place to tackle the problem of matching a particular car to a particular component.
There is an important distinction between being able to find a product and being able to use it. A search can produce a convincing photograph and an attractive price while leaving the decisive question unanswered: will this fit? In auto parts, resemblance is a poor substitute for compatibility. The catalogue has to carry enough information to make the purchase useful.
By 2017, Jiang was describing a system in which users entered the vehicle’s frame number and a part name to retrieve the appropriate component code. The company’s database then contained more than 100 million vehicle identification numbers and seven million stock-keeping units. Its platform covered fifteen high-end brands. Those were early figures, but they show where the work was going: underneath the shopfront, into the identification machinery.
A VIN gives a car a specific identity. A component code gives the purchasing conversation something more precise than a description. Bringing those together can reduce the number of occasions on which a buyer and seller think they agree, only to discover their disagreement when the parcel arrives. The little screw earns its place in this story by refusing to be interchangeable merely because it is little.
- 01Identify the carVehicle identification number
- 02Match the partA specific component code
- 03Compare the offerSupplier, terms and availability
- 04Complete the repairThe workshop serves the driver
A conceptual view of the procurement workflow, not a measure of processing time.
A marketplace needs rules as well as listings
The next difficulty is trust. A correct component code cannot tell a workshop everything it needs to know about the product’s quality, the seller’s obligations or the remedy if something goes wrong. Jiang’s ambition extended to transaction standards and a credit system. Software would have to help define the agreement, as well as introduce the participants.
In 2018, he argued that China’s parts supply chain needed its own approach rather than a borrowed American model. His emphasis was on the complexity of full-vehicle parts and the fragmented demand behind them. The reasoning matters because it places the company’s origins inside a particular market. An imported business diagram might look tidy while leaving the actual purchasing problem untouched.
A year later, CassTime announced an $80 million Series C1 round jointly led by Sequoia Capital China and Source Code Capital. At the time, it reported operations in more than 300 Chinese cities, over 1,200 selected suppliers and more than 60,000 workshop customers. These are the company’s 2019 figures, rather than a present-day census.
“Casstime is an open platform. We welcome any supplier that can offer high quality services.”
Overmars Jiang, October 2019
The invitation contains a condition. Openness still requires a judgement about service. A marketplace needs enough participants to be useful, yet each disappointing transaction can weaken the confidence that brought a buyer there. That tension helps explain why Jiang keeps returning to standards. Adding a supplier is easy to celebrate. Making the next purchase dependable is the recurring obligation.
CassTime also developed workshop management software called Workshop #1, or “1号车间”, alongside its procurement services. This put the company closer to the ordinary work of a repair business. Orders exist inside jobs; jobs exist inside customer relationships. A procurement tool becomes more useful when the surrounding work can carry the same information.
The customer lives nearby
Jiang has a grounding observation about the end customer. In a 2019 interview, he described automotive repair as a long-term, slow business. People generally get their cars repaired near home or work. Someone in Shanghai is unlikely to go to Suzhou casually for a repair. Quality and service matter because the customer has every opportunity to choose a different nearby workshop next time.
This brings his technology argument back to human scale. A national network must justify itself in a local transaction. The workshop owner still has to explain a bill. The technician still has to finish the job. The driver still wants the car back. Better data can assist each of them, but the usefulness of the data is judged at the counter.
Jiang’s public language also makes room for a little theatre. When Valeo colleagues asked about CassTime’s winged-horse logo in 2023, he explained the wings as digital technology helping the industry. He also connected the Chinese name to openness and reflection. A supply-chain business is allowed a horse, provided the horse can help find a part.
By 2024, his examples included scanning work orders and recognising tyre information from photographs. These were applications he described in his partner-conference speech. Their appeal follows the same practical pattern as the earlier frame-number search: take something a workshop already handles and make it easier to turn into usable purchasing information. The more ambitious vocabulary arrives after the everyday task.
Eleven years later, the arithmetic gets sharper
In April 2026, CassTime submitted a Hong Kong listing application. Its draft disclosures describe a considerably larger business: more than 375,000 registered workshops across 329 Chinese cities at the end of 2025, with support for more than 48 million parts SKUs. Registration measures the network’s reach; it should not be mistaken for a count of workshops buying every day.
Company-reported platform coverage at December 31, 2025.
The same draft disclosures report 2025 revenue of RMB929.5 million and a loss for the year of RMB399.1 million. Revenue had increased from 2024 and the annual loss had narrowed. Both facts belong beside the network figures. A business can become more useful to its participants while continuing to face a difficult financial equation.
For Jiang, that makes the next chapter more demanding than simply adding names to the platform. A large catalogue demonstrates breadth. A dependable transaction demonstrates service. A sustainable business must also make the economics work. Each test asks a different question, and success on one does not settle the others.
The company’s product range now spans supplier procurement, workshop transactions and workshop certification. Its expansion reflects the ambition to connect more of the service chain. It also gives Jiang more relationships to manage. Manufacturers, distributors and repair shops have different needs; the network has to be worth joining for each of them.
Beyond Shenzhen, back to the workshop
At the November 2025 partner conference, Jiang spoke about overseas expansion alongside Chinese vehicles going abroad. He described CassTime’s app being used in countries including Saudi Arabia and discussed AI tools working across Arabic, English and Spanish. His longer-term aspiration was a service network joining digital systems to factories and warehouses across markets. That is an ambition he has articulated, rather than a completed map.
There is a pleasing return in the geography. Years spent abroad helped him notice a difference in service. The business he built in response is now looking beyond China. The direction changes, but the question is recognisable: can the people repairing a car obtain information and parts they can rely on?
The BMW checklist remains a useful way to understand Jiang. It gave a customer enough detail to feel comfortable leaving the workshop. CassTime’s much larger undertaking asks whether a chain of businesses can provide that same assurance, transaction after transaction. Somewhere between a component code and a completed repair, the technology has to earn the customer’s confidence. The car, after all, still has to leave the lift.