online-car-buying
(8)
Crown Automotive Group puts the whole deal within reach
Four Richmond-area dealerships. One complicated purchase. Crown combines local showrooms with online tools for the trade-in, the financing, and the signatures in between.
Carvana made buying easy. Then came the hard part.
The car vending machine gets the attention. The real story is a $2.2 billion bet on the unglamorous business of moving, fixing and financing cars.
Spinny bought the cars. And the doubt.
To make second-hand cars easier to trust, Spinny stopped playing matchmaker and became the seller. The trade-off: every promise now comes with inventory, workshops and a bill.
Gubagoo and the car deal that forgot its own price
A shopper builds a deal online. A salesperson starts it again in the showroom. Gubagoo has built a business around making those two encounters remember each other.
CarMax
The company that killed the haggle in 1993 now sells three-quarters of a million used cars a year - and is trying to prove that a car lot can also be a website.
Syarah
Syarah is Riyadh-based online marketplace for buying and selling new and used cars in Saudi Arabia. It handles the full transaction online - sourcing, 200-point inspection, refurbishment, financing, warranty and kingdom-wide home delivery - and lets buyers keep a car for a 10-day trial with a money-back guarantee. Founded in 2015, it has grown from a classifieds site into the country's leading digital used-car retailer, raising more than $82 million in total funding, including a $60 million Series C in 2024.
AutoFi
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.
Kevin Singerman
Kevin Singerman is the CEO and Co-Founder of AutoFi, a San Francisco-based automotive fintech company he co-founded in 2015 with Mandar Gokhale and Jonathan T. Palan. AutoFi has become a leading end-to-end automotive sales and financing platform, processing over 1 million financing requests and $3+ billion in vehicle sales annually, backed by $125M+ in funding including an $85M Series C at a $700M valuation. Singerman built his career at the intersection of finance and technology, with stints at Deutsche Bank, SunGard, Stephens Inc., and LendingClub before launching AutoFi to transform how cars are bought and sold.