If you’re looking to buy or sell a used EV right now, what’s the first step you’d take?
A startup called Ever wants to be the answer to that question. The company, which bills itself as the first “native, full-stack automotive retailer” for electric vehicles, already has thousands of customers buying and selling their EVs on the platform.
Now it’s trying to scale with the help of a $31 million Series A funding round led by Eclipse, with co-investors Ibex Investors, Lifeline Ventures and JIMCO – the investment arm of Saudi Arabia’s Jameel family (an early investor in Rivian).
Over the past decade, companies like Carvana and CarMax have helped usher in the digital car buying experience. More recently, a myriad of startups have sought to enhance the car-buying experience with artificial intelligence, introducing ideas such as voice agents or smarter programming software. However, Eclipse’s Jiten Behl believes this is the wrong approach if you want to truly modernize the auto retail experience.
“These bolt-on AI tools are band-aids,” he told TechCrunch. He likened it to how many early electric cars from major automakers were essentially combustion vehicles repackaged to fit electric powertrains. This approach came with significant trade-offs compared to designing a new EV from the ground up, followed by companies like Tesla and Rivian.
“Automated retail is a perfect candidate for AI disruption, you know? It’s a lot of process, a lot of work, [very] rules-based,” he said.
Lasse-Mathias Nyberg, co-founder and CEO of Ever, said in an interview that buying or selling a car typically triggers “hundreds or thousands of different actions” that a retailer must perform to complete the transaction. “There are huge complexities or frictions on both sides.”
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In 2022, he and his team set out to reduce or remove these complexities. What they came up with after a year of research was a digital first car retailer. The underlying technology is an orchestration layer or “operating system” that can handle all the different workflows behind a transaction, whether it’s processing information submitted by a prospective buyer or seller, or managing vehicle inventory.
“When you’re doing assessments, or pricing, or securities, it’s very deterministic in terms of what steps to take. And today, there are a lot of single point solution tools that are used,” he said. Most companies “use these tools together in a very inefficient way and you think you’re on a digital journey — but if you could really clean it up and if you could really use the power of agentic AI and you can create a unified customer experience and remove all those micro-frictions.”
Nyberg claimed that building the company this way has allowed Ever’s sales team to be two to three times more productive than they would otherwise be, and he expects that to scale as the company grows. He said this extra efficiency and productivity increases their profit margins, which can be kept as profit or passed on to the customer by offering lower prices.
Ever is implementing this new approach in both its online marketplace and physical locations. Nyberg said the hybrid model is important because seeing and testing a car up close remains crucial to the shopping experience for many buyers — especially those who may be evaluating EVs for the first time.
Early reviews of Ever’s product were mixed. Users to a certain Reddit thread since last year they’ve been split, with some interested in how Ever makes it easier to buy electric vehicles, while others detail matches getting in touch with the startup’s team. Ever was just getting off the ground and more or less operating in stealth, so Nyberg calls it a learning experience. He said his team is working hard to ensure its system can be flexible enough to achieve everything the company has set out to do.
The biggest challenge may be overall interest in electric vehicles, which has cooled a bit in the United States. Nyberg said he hasn’t ruled out ever buying or selling used combustion cars in the future, but he wants to stick with electric cars in the near future, since there’s no laser-focused retailer on those vehicles.
Behl, who spent eight years on Rivian’s leadership team, admitted to being a “hopeless romantic about EVs” and said he still believes the industry is moving toward electric propulsion because of the inherent advantages. And he said his “first thought” when he started curating Ever was, “I wish Rivian would do that.”
More broadly, Behl said, companies like Carvana are still in single-digit market shares when it comes to auto retail. That’s why he sees so much upside in Ever.
“Customers will continue to gravitate towards the best experience when it comes to buying cars, which means it will be a digitally-driven customer experience that takes all the friction out of buying and selling a car,” he said.
