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Hey y’all - Ten years ago, Cars24 tracked bids using phone calls and spreadsheets.
Today, it’s a digital-first, AI-powered platform handling over 100 million data points a day.

This isn’t just a digital upgrade.
It’s a full-scale reinvention, built on urgency, innovation, and relentless iteration.

Here's how one of India’s leading autotech startups evolved from manual chaos to an intelligent ecosystem that’s redefining the used car experience.

From Spreadsheets to Scalability: How Cars24 Engineered a Digital Overhaul

The Catalyst: Crisis Meets Opportunity

The COVID-19 pandemic forced Cars24, like many companies, to rethink everything.
Physical inspections, phone-based bidding, offline financing, all suddenly unscalable.
But instead of freezing, they moved. Fast.

Abhishek Gupta, AVP - BI & Strategy, explained how the company dismantled data silos, rebuilt workflows from scratch, and created a foundation for fast, automated decision-making.

Digital transformation wasn’t optional. It was survival.

Going Digital-First: Reimagining the Experience

Cars24 didn’t just digitize processes.
They rebuilt the customer journey.

Buyers and sellers now interact through a seamless platform. Listing a vehicle requires minimal effort.
Dealers participate in real-time auctions from anywhere.

DIY pricing tools.
A mobile-first inspection app.
End-to-end online transactions.

This wasn’t about building cool features, it was about removing friction and putting control in the hands of users.

Result?
Faster cycles.
Fewer drop-offs.
Higher trust.

Beyond Cars: Building a Multi-Service Ecosystem

What started as a used car marketplace is now an interconnected ecosystem.
Cars24 has expanded into:

Each unit, procurement, retail, financing, is powered by shared digital infrastructure.

Why does this matter?

Because scaling complexity without digitization leads to collapse.
Cars24 scaled with intelligence, ensuring that each business unit complements the others, not competes with them.

AI at the Core: Not Just a Feature, but a Philosophy

Most companies bolt AI onto existing workflows.
Cars24 made it foundational.

They built a dedicated AI & Innovation team, tasked with identifying areas of automation, intelligence, and optimization across the board.

This team isn't just building dashboards.
They’re building AI that actively participates in decision-making.

From evaluating car health to automating support conversations, AI is embedded in the company’s DNA.

Meet the AI Toolbox: 4 Game-Changers

Cars24 developed powerful in-house AI tools that are transforming how business gets done:

1. Autonaut: A conversational AI chatbot that handles real-time queries, reducing call-back rates and improving agent efficiency.

2 .CarTruth: Gives buyers detailed history on a vehicle, from service records to accident reports, improving trust and transparency.

3. Orbit: Offers real-time car valuation, challan tracking, and compliance alerts. It’s the financial and legal assistant customers didn’t know they needed.

4. Inspection App: Allows users to run diagnostics and photo-based inspections, creating a standardized, scalable inspection process, no expert needed.

Together, these tools process 100 million data points daily, and the company plans to scale this to 5 billion/day.

That’s not iteration. That’s infrastructure.

Strategic Partnerships: Scaling with Smart Friends

You can’t scale alone.

Cars24 understood this, and partnered strategically with best-in-class providers:

• Snowflake powers their AI data cloud, unifying data from every vertical for real-time analytics and decision-making.

• AWS & Google Cloud handle compute and storage.

• SAP HANA automates financial processes.

• Tableau enables stunning visualizations for cross-team alignment.

• Fivetran ensures data pipelines are reliable, fast, and scalable.

The outcome?
Tech teams focus on enrichment and personalization instead of firefighting infrastructure.

This is how a startup becomes a platform.

Build vs Buy: The Smart Balancing Act

Cars24 doesn’t fall into the trap of building everything in-house.

This mindset allows them to move fast, ship early, and learn through live feedback.

Many products aren’t launched as perfect. But they’re launched with purpose, and refined with user data, not assumptions.

This is how agility meets scale.

The Road Ahead: A Blueprint for Digital Reinvention

Cars24’s journey isn’t just about selling cars.

It’s about building a resilient, scalable, AI-first organization, one that turns friction into opportunity and complexity into clarity.

Their playbook includes:

• Ruthless simplification of customer journeys

• Strategic tech partnerships to accelerate scale

• Deep AI integration across departments

• A fearless, launch-then-learn approach to product

This transformation wasn’t about fancy tech for PR.
It was about earning the right to serve a modern customer, better, faster, smarter.

To Sum up

From spreadsheets to real-time AI tools, Cars24 has rewritten what it means to be a digital-first company in a legacy-heavy industry.

Their success isn’t accidental. It’s a result of:

• Relentless customer obsession

• Deep alignment between product, data, and operations

• Smart automation backed by strategic thinking

As tech continues to reshape industries, Cars24’s evolution offers a masterclass for founders, operators, and enterprise leaders alike.

The future favors those who build for it.