Cardekho: The journey from collecting Brochures of the Cars to $500 million valuation
Cardekho was launched in 2008 by sibling duo Amit Jain and Anurag Jain in Jaipur,India. The journey began when two brothers started collecting brochures of the cars during Delhi Auto Expo in 2008 which was later uploaded in website . After 2 months of research and preparation CarDekho – an online classified platform to compare cars and read specifications went live.
Although the platform was ready in 2 months, Jain brothers had hard time to make money from this business. Jain brothers kept funding CarDekho through their software development company revenue, Grinarsoft’s service.
The company was bootstrapped till 2013 and received its 1st funding of $15 million from Sequoia Capital in 2013. In initial days the major source of revenue was through advertising. It has changed now. The major portion of revenue is generated by selling leads to dealers.
CarDekho currently https://nygoodhealth.com works with more than eight car and motorcycle manufacturers and impacts 15-30 per cent of their combined annual sales. In addition, the company works in collaboration with more than 10 financial institutions across the country to facilitate used car financing.
Reportedly the platform has over 39 million monthly unique visitors and six million plus apps downloads . It is understood that revenue of the company went from $16.3 million in the 2017 to $22.8 million in 2018.
The company raised a massive $100 million in its latest investment round recently in a Series C funding round from existing investors Sequoia India, Hillhouse Capital, Alphabet’s growth investment arm Capital G and Axis Bank at $400-500 million valuation.
The company also has also made international a presence under the brand names of ZigWheels and OTO, covering countries such as Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia.