online-car-buying
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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.