Remember the time you purchased your first car? It just brings so much excitement and energy. However, you would also agree that it was difficult for you to choose a car from the multiple options available with the desired specifications and within your budget. You had to visit various showrooms and car dealers for getting your best option? Thus, to solve this problem and afford convenience to any customer who wants to purchase a car or to sell his car, there are a lot of online automobile platforms coming into the market, one of which is Cardekho. Cardekho is one of the top e-automobile platforms that was founded by Amit Jain & Anurag Jain in the year 2008, under its IT-based parent company, Girnar Software Private Limited, and is headquartered in Gurugram India. Cardekho has been specially recognized and popular among its customers for affording convenience to its customers for car searches from thousands of listed cars and sale-purchase of cars by matching new and used cars as per their requirement and budget without any compromise in quality which used to be difficult to accomplish before its launch.
Not only this, the platform allows its users to use the platform to access insights about the automobile business industry, fresh updates about cars with their images & videos, product descriptions with its special features, an exhaustive list of car brands and models available to its customers, car prices, comparisons, post queries on the platform in India in different languages and simple terms so that every customer could understand the same.
In recent years, Cardekho has worked towards diversification of services being offered on the Cardekho platform rather than just sticking to its primary car dealer business. It has ventured into the automobile industry and equipment; Bikedekho services for dealing in bikes, Insurance facilities for automobile and health insurance, Loan against cars, and an e-store on its platforms that provides for car and bike-related accessories such as tires, stickers, floor mats, navigators, seat covers, tires, alloy wheels, stereos, car perfumes, scratch removers, polish, mobile chargers, shampoo, navigators, seat covers, tires, alloy wheels, car stereos, car perfumes, sun films, among others. Around the year 2020, it ventured into Cardekho Gaadi physical stores which were opened in many states across the country with a total count of 88, but due to the business slow-down in 2020, it had to shut down some of them, and presently, there are 60 physical Cardekho Gaadi stores across the country for the facilitation of used car purchase & sales in the country.
Apart from the services offered relating to the automobile industry, Cardekho has entered into strategic partnerships with financial institutions like BankBazaar.com and Berkshire Insurance and offers financial services such as instant car loans, loans against cars, and car insurance facilities to its target audience. Due to its unique selling proposition, it became one of the start-ups to raise seed funding from Ratan Tata.
Cardekho – Mission & Objectives
The literal meaning of “Cardekho” is “Look for Cars”, and its main objective is to create a digitized auto ecosystem in the country and make it easier for customers to find affordable & quality automobiles without any hassles. It aims to become the largest automobile business player in the Indian market through its advanced search engine platform through cars and car-related information. With time, Cardekho has become one of the most trusted virtual car dealers that are technically sound and updated and provide a holistic experience to its customers. Some of its top market competitors to cater the same set of a target audience include-
- Car Trade
- Droom Technology
- Alcon Hyundai and
- Carwale
What led to the inception of Cardekho?
Amit Jain & Anurag Jain are the two founders who belong to a pearl family in Jaipur, Rajasthan. Both completed their graduation in engineering from IIT Delhi and worked for a brief period in different companies. However, due to a family emergency, they had to come back and that’s when they decided to start something of their own, and they started an IT outsourcing company namely, Girnar Software Solutions Pvt. Ltd. For bringing more business, they started pitching emails to his high-ticket clients on the portfolio and got their first client only after shooting billions of emails and making thousands of calls. However, it didn’t pay much. But, later on, they started receiving projects and references, after which they started collecting funds to start their dream project, so Cardekho was launched in the year 2008, based on the ideas gained by the brother’s visit to an International Autoexpo in Delhi, where they picked brochures from different automobile stalls and then created a database for automobiles, thinking it would be helpful for the users to get all the cars related data online and soon Cardekho was alive as a start-up that started getting website traffic of 300-500 and slowly reached 1000 on a daily basis.
However, for the sake of risk minimization, both the founders decide to keep their IT outsourcing business going on despite the conceptualization of the start-up idea and launch of the start-up business, which helped them in a steady flow of capital for business purposes rather than relying on any outside source (i.e. debt or equity funding). Like every entrepreneurial venture, it moved slowly in the beginning but managed to gear up the pace with time, and sooner than expected numbers started roaring the success of the business. Therefore, Cardekho is one of those premiere ventures that has helped its customer from end-to-end assistance during the completion of the offered and chosen services through its platform. At present, it has a reach in more than 100 markets with a catalog of 3,000+ certified pre-owned cars and huge popularity among its customers for online purchases on its platform.
Cardekho entered the list of unicorn start-ups club in Oct 2021 after reaching a valuation of 1.2 billion USD and revenue of $125.49 million (Rs 936 Crores) in FY21.
Founders & Team
As provided above, Cardekho was founded by two brothers Amit Jain & Anurag Jain in the year 2008, who are serving the management positions and founder responsibilities simultaneously. It is during their working period they developed a liking for technology-related products & services.
Amit Jain obtained a Bachelor’s Degree in B.Tech and worked for companies like Tata Consultancy & Trilogy Innovations for a brief period. Currently, he is the CEO & the Founder of the company. Whereas Anurag Jain, also an IIT alumnus obtained his degree in an Integrated Masters of Technology in Mathematics and Computing and worked as a “Senior Operations Consultant” at i2 Technologies and Sabre Holdings as “Senior Research Operations Analyst ”for a brief period before launching, Girnar Software Solutions. At present, he is the founder & Chief Operations Officer of the company.
Umang Kumar the founder of Gaadi.com, later on, joined as a Co-founder of Cardekho business after the latter acquired the Gaadi.com business. He is an alumnus of Visvesvaraya technological university, from where he obtained a BE in Computers, next he joined Post Graduate Diploma in Management from the Indian School of Business and then joined the Harvard Business School for the Naspers program in General Management, Strategy & Leadership and worked for a brief period for companies like- Accentium Web.
Cardekho Growth, Business & Revenue Model
Cardekho works on essentially all business models i.e. B2B, B2C &C2C models concerning its various business activities. Beginning from Jaipur to its headquarters in Gurgaon Delhi and has now expanded its footprints across countries like Indonesia & the Philippines.
Cardekho runs revenue fundamentally through these three categories-
- Revenue generated through Google AdSense,
- Revenue made by sponsored advertisements,
- Revenue from the commission received from the automobile manufacturers and dealers.
Later on, it developed its iOS application after the Android application was made live on the Google Play store and was downloaded by more than 10,000 people in a month. The use and popularity of the Cardekho application were doubled resulting in a three-fold increase in revenues by 2014 including an expanding team of more than 600 members in total.
Next, Cardekho introduced multiple business segments under its umbrella that include other automobile-related and users related online portals such as BikeDekho, PriceDekho, MobileDekho, Gaadi.com, ZigWheels.com, BikeDekho.com, PowerDrift.com, and more. Alternatively, it decided to launch physical automobile dealer shops across many parts of the country that came to be known as “Cardekho Gaadi stores”. Such stores served as a “One-stop shop” to undertake the sale and purchase of pre-owned cars with all quality & security checks under the brand trust mark for the customers. Consequently, Cardekho became a trusted corporation for its customers to rely on from the start to the end process ultimately helping them to expand their consumer base.
Cardekho Funding & Financials
To date, Cardekho has raised around $497.5 million during its nine founding rounds, with the latest being a mixed bag of debt funding & equity funding worth $50 million and $200 million on October 13, 2021, from LeapFrog Investments along with a bunch of other existing investors. This major funding helped Cardekho to earn itself a place in the unicorn start-ups of the year 2021 as “the third Indian unicorn in the used car retailing space so far in 2021”, making it India’s 33rd unicorn in 2021 making its valuation reach $1.2 billion. CarDekho becomes CarDekho start-up has accumulated a total of $497.5M in funding over 9 rounds. Some of the note-worthy investors include- Ratan Tata, Sunley House Capital Management and Sequoia Capital Hill house Capital, Ping An, Sunley House, Capital (previously Google Capital), Times Internet, Trifecta, HDFC Bank, Axis Bank, and Dentsu.
Accordingly, Cardekho group is now known in India as the largest automotive video content player and the largest consumer-facing digital destination with more than 2 million youtube subscribers and 41 million monthly visitors, making Cardekho one of the largest social media platforms. By 2016, it expanded its presence in Indonesia under a new brand name “OTO”, which came on to become the greatest auto platform in the country.
Cardekho has also made ESOP options to its employees in a secondary sale allowing them to cash out 50 percent of their vested options under Girnarsoft group’s ESOP Exercise that will be worth around $3.5 million for the second time since its inception. For the first time, they issue ESOP options for the first time in the FY19 in which CarDekho bought ESOPs worth $2 million.
Cardekho- Acquisitions & Investments
CarDekho has to date acquired three businesses namely- Gaadi Web, an automotive platform for the Indian market providing for a search platform for all kinds of automotive vehicles – newer, used & upcoming vehicles in the market that was acquired by the company for a sum of $11 million. Next, was ZigWheels.com is one of the leading automotive platforms that offer is comprehensive coverage of the latest automobile news and finally, Carmudi is a leading automotive website operating in the Philippines that was acquired lately by the company. All these actions made CarDekho the undisputed market leader with a massive volume of 15 million customers every month.
Cardekho- Business Marketing Strategy
Cardekho is recognized as the premier leader venture of digitizing the automobile ecosystem in India. The COVID-19 pandemic brought a halt to the business due to the restricted movements even came to a situation of zero sales. However, it was quick enough to understand the buyer attributes-
- Customer’s Desire to get the best deals in car buying and
- To get the best deals in selling an old car and buying a new one.
Accordingly, they adopted the following marketing strategies-
i. It partnered with Disney+Hotstar, the online streaming platform for showing Cardekho ads for 129 seconds in total during the IPL Season, through which there targeted sequential ads which were played after existing auto ads showing how can a user could get the best possible car deals for new & used cars from any time & anywhere;
ii. It diverted the business from Car dealing business to other business segments such as car & health insurance and introduced car inspection at the home facility so that consumers need not come to Cardekho Gaadi physical stores amid safety concerns.
iii. Other than this, there was an efficient digital marketing strategy in place that helped the business to generate customer traffic that includes-
- Content Marketing- Since the beginning, Cardekho used SEO based content marketing by uploading unique content on daily basis with core SEO in place along with paid marketing and ad campaigns, ultimately leading to a 90% increase in the Cardekho users and around 110% increase in Bikedekho users even from Tier 2 & Tier 3 Cities.
- Ad Campaigns- It made targeted ads for customers post-reopen after Covid Lockdowns highlighting consumer anxiety as they identify means of transport that are safe and reliable, sales of cars and bikes have seen a sharp rise. Its ad “The everyday hero” supports the cause of personal mobility. Similarly, it targeted “Karo India forward Theme with star celebrities like former cricketer Rahul David & Mahesh Babu highlighting the convenience afforded by Cardekho to its customers to sell a used car while sitting at their home despite the odds created by the pandemic.
Some analysts believe that though Cardekho has a great business model & business potential, they use new cars and older cars that are equal in value terms, which could be problematic if there is any incorrect assessment of any car, it may cause loss of trust or reliability on the business and promoters are going to be blamed for the same.
Cardekho had its fair share of struggles and challenges, with a slow beginning and almost a zero sales business in 2020, but it managed to carve out a path for itself and has stood the test of time. With all its efficiencies and capabilities, it hopes to create an automotive ecosystem that would contain all the technological requirements of all stakeholders such as auto businesses, dealers, and consumers and is primarily focused on mobile apps, car apps, connected cars, international expansion, car pricing, insurance, finance, and accessories.
By establishing a stellar presence in the Indian automobile market, Cardekho is currently seeking expansion and making its presence in Southeast Asian markets and has already has started baby steps to start its business operations in countries like Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines, by acquiring Carmudi in Indonesia and is further looking to list its name in the Indian public stock exchange that will be likely coming in next 18 months according to the Co-founder & President Umang Kumar. The Company will so soon start the processes and compliance from a regulatory perspective for the IPO.
