Surpassing the Unicorn Race with Used Cars

As I write about the candid conversation with Cars24 founders on crossing the Unicorn mark the country just reported the 9th Unicorn amid the year of pandemic.

- Punita Sabharwal

This further proves the fact that pandemic or no pandemic companies with sound financials and a solid team will continue to be backed by marquee investors. As we unfolded the money special issue for our year-ender, we thought about putting across a cover which spoke about the support investors bring in to the growth of a fledgling startup. Take the case in point of Cars24, which rode to being a unicorn in just five years of incepting the company.

Selling a car used to be a tedious task before these portals made our lives easier. One such portal that we see Mahendra Singh Dhoni endorsing is CARS24. Vikram Chopra, Mehul Agrawal, Gajendra Jangid and Ruchit Agarwal got together in 2015 to start Cars24. Vikram happened to be an analyst at Sequoia and set up Fabfurnish before Cars24. Being an investor and entrepreneur earlier he brought the right pedigree to the next startup and remains to be guiding light at the startup bringing in rest of the three co-founders. Like Vikram, Gajendra too has a BTech and MTech in Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. Graduated from Cornell University, Ruchit was a Vice President at Bank of America Merrill Lynch before co-founding CARS24. Mehul holds an MBA from IIM Calcutta and has worked with BCG in the past. This company, though just 5 years old, has gone on to become the of the ‘supply’ side conducting over 100,000 transactions a year. The company’s unique C2B model has helped it to leapfrog the existing C2C and B2C models obstructively. It buys cars from individuals and sells them to dealers. Unlike a classified platform, Cars24 enables end-to-end transactions and charges commission for each transaction.