Buying a motorcycle online is easy until somebody has to finish the sale. Ekho is making that somebody software, while keeping dealers in the deal.
Vroom paid about $120 million for Vast’s CarStory business. When Vroom stopped selling cars, the software kept working - a revealing tale about the value, and limits, of knowing what a vehicle is worth.
A car buyer can vanish from a sales pipeline without vanishing from the market. Fullpath has built a business around remembering the difference.
A dealership can buy a shopper’s attention and still lose the sale between two screens. CarNow’s wager is that the missing ingredient is a conversation that remembers what came before.
The car buyer moves from a sofa to a showroom. RouteOne’s business is making sure the finance paperwork survives the trip.
A Brazilian car catalogue grew into a business woven through dealer software, financing and the first WhatsApp reply. Its history explains why the work around the sale can be worth as much attention as the listing.
The car-shopping marketplace turned price comparisons into a subscription business. Its retreat from CarOffer shows how much harder the job becomes when software has to move the metal.
FDC Solutions picked a narrow, unglamorous problem - getting the right heavy-equipment part to the right place before downtime becomes expensive. Twenty-four years later, its software sits between dealer ERPs, warehouse workers, robots and customers across more than 80 Cat dealer organizations.
Car dealers do not lack data; they lack a clean way to act on it. PureCars built a business by connecting the messy records in the dealership basement to the ads, messages and appointments happening upstairs.
Peter Duffy began with 20-plus photographers serving nearly 50 dealerships. Then he decided the visiting-photographer model was the bottleneck - and built software that lets dealer staff shoot the cars themselves.
A Jaipur garage project grew into a web of marketplaces, lenders, insurers and dealer tools. The clever part is not the car listing - it is everything CarDekho can attach to the decision that follows.
Born to replace phone-and-fax parts orders, OEC now sits between the companies that build vehicles and the people who put them back on the road - turning scattered inventory, repair procedures and paperwork into one connected workflow.
Cars.com built the audience. Now its parent is connecting that traffic to dealer websites, appraisals, advertising and wholesale auctions - a bid to own more of the messy journey from search box to showroom.

Impel started by teaching the internet how to walk around a car. Now it is trying to run the conversations, follow-ups and service reminders that turn a vehicle listing into a customer relationship.
Solera sits behind the moments when a car is claimed, repaired, sold, tracked, or returned to the road. Its advantage is not one famous app, but a deep reservoir of vehicle data wired into the daily work of insurers, shops, dealers, and fleets.
AutoFi is a San Francisco-based automotive commerce and finance platform that lets dealers sell and finance cars online and in the showroom. It connects buyers to a network of lenders, runs real-time credit decisioning, and powers checkout for big-name OEMs and dealer groups - most notably Ford Motor Credit.