Launching a startup from a Tier 2 city and scaling it up to a billion-dollar business is not easy. But brothers Amit Jain, 49 and Anurag Jain, 47, dreamt of it way back in 2008 and launched CarDekho from their hometown, Jaipur. It all started in 2005 when Shark Tank fame Amit Jain, now CEO and co-founder of CarDekho. was transferred to Bengaluru from Austin by Trilogy, a Texas-based company where he was working as a senior associate. Anurag was also in Bengaluru around that time, working at Sabre Holdings. The brothers, both alumni of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi and Jaipur’s St Xavier’s School, were always inclined towards academics and tech.
During school days, the brothers had only one goal, to grab a high-paying job. IIT was a sure-shot path to achieving it. But his seven-year tenure at Trilogy exposed him to the startup ecosystem. This is when he learnt about getting traffic on the website and understood the other nuances of building product-led startups. Anurag was also inclined to launch something on his own.
“IIT also gives wings to big dreams,” Amit said. But just when the brothers started conversing about it, their father passed away due to cancer in 2006. Amit and Anurag decided to quit their jobs, go back to Jaipur, live in a joint family and start something from there.
In January 2007, they both turned their garage into an office and launched a software outsourcing company, GirnarSoft. “Since we were programmers, we thought of building code for others and making money,” Amit says. It was a bootstrapped company, so the founders were always sure of one thing: positive cash flow, something that they continue to follow to date. In FY24, the CarDekho Group recorded a net revenue of Rs 2,074 crore, a 54% growth year-over-year from Rs 1,347 crore in FY23.
By the end of the year, the company was doing well, and they hired around 20 employees. The biggest challenge of course was finding talent. “Experienced people would look at our office (a garage) and not take the interview. So, we had to get freshers from Jaipur and train them,” Amit says.
It was in 2008 that Amit and Anurag experienced the eureka moment when they visited the Delhi Auto Expo as part of their plan to buy a car. But the car search exposed them to a lot of gaps. There was no consolidated information on automobiles in one place.
“There were only brochures from different places. Hunting a car was a painful process. So, immediately after coming back from the auto expo, we decided to code a website and put the catalogue online,” he says. In no time, people started dropping by the website and it gathered a lot of traction. An idea that came out of their own needs started becoming bigger and bigger. The founders started focusing a lot more on CarDekho while GirnarSoft continued to operate as the parent company.
Simultaneously, the founders toyed with many more ideas and verticals, such as PriceDekho, where one could compare e-commerce rates and take an informed decision. But one thing common among all platforms was that they all depended on traffic through Google, something that Amit understood very well during his time at Trilogy.
For any new offering, the Jain brothers had a thumb rule. In six-eight months, if the vertical/company doesn’t turn cash positive, they will shut it down. By 2011, things started looking up. CarDekho became the largest visited auto platform in the country and the enquiries for advertising increased. This is when an auto trader from Australia was scouting India for assets. Amit and Anurag were invited to Atlanta for a deal, where they understood that what they were building had the potential to become a large company, something they had envisioned for themselves during their Bengaluru days. The brothers came back and built a new office for around 80-90 people, but still with a doubt in mind if the office would ever fill up.”
Today, the CarDekho Group has around 6000 employees. In 2013, CarDekho secured its first funding in a Series A round of $15 million, led by PeakXV, followed by a Series B round in 2015, when it raised $50 million from investors such as Ratan Tata, Hillhouse Capital, Tybourne Capital and existing investors.
In FY2015-16, the group’s auto portals CarDekho, Gaadi, Zigwheels and BikeDekho received 338 million visits. It also co-sponsored the IPL broadcast with two TV ads. In 2021, CarDekho raised a $200 million Series E round and joined the unicorn club with a valuation of $1.2 billion and became the first unicorn from Jaipur.
What began as an online catalogue has today grown into a group that houses platforms such as CarDekho, BikeDekho, Gaadi.com, Zigwheels, PowerDrift, InsuranceDekho, Rupyy, OTO, Revv and Carrum, among others. “When we started our business, we mentioned on our LinkedIn profile that we are building a billion-dollar company. The aim was always large, and we cut down anything that could not become large, even if it was profitable. The focus was and still remains to think big and take a plunge,” Amit says.