If you’re looking to buy or sell a used EV right now, what’s the first step to take?
A startup called Ever wants to be the answer to that question. The company, which bills itself as the first “AI-native, full-stack auto retail business” for electric vehicles, already has thousands of customers buying and selling their EVs on the platform.
It is now looking to scale with help from a $31 million Series A funding round led by Eclipse, with Ibex Investors, Lifeline Ventures, and JIMCO – the investment arm of the Saudi Arabian Jameel family (an early investor in Rivian) – as co-investors.
Over the past decade, companies like Carvana and Carmax have helped usher in a digital car buying experience. Recently, many startups have tried to improve the car buying experience with AI, pitching ideas like voice agents or intelligent scheduling software. Eclipse’s Jiten Behl thinks this is the wrong approach if you want to modernize the car dealership experience, however.
“These bolt-on AI tools are band-aids,” he said in an interview with TechCrunch. He compared it to how many of the first EVs from major automakers were combustion vehicles that were repackaged to fit electric trains. That approach came with major trade-offs compared to designing a new EV from the ground up, which was the approach companies like Tesla and Rivian took.
“Sales automation is a perfect candidate for AI disruption, you know? It’s a lot of process, a lot of work, [very] which is based on laws,” he said.
Lasse-Mathias Nyberg, founder and CEO of Ever, said in an interview that buying or selling a car often involves “hundreds or thousands of different actions” that the seller needs to complete to complete the transaction. “There is a lot of difficulty or tension on both sides.”
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In 2022, he and his team began to reduce or eliminate those constraints. What they settled on after a year of research was the first digital car dealership. The underlying technology is an orchestration layer or “operating system” that can handle all the different workflows behind the scenes, whether it’s processing information sent by a potential buyer or seller, or managing a car inventory.
“When you do appraisals, or put prices, or write words, it’s very clear what steps need to be taken. And today, there are many single point resolution tools used,” he said. Many companies “use these tools together in an ineffective way, and you think that you are on a digital journey – but if you can clean it up, and if you can actually use the power of AI for the agent, and you can create one unified customer experience and remove all these small conflicts.”
Nyberg said building the company this way has allowed Ever’s sales team to be two to three times more productive than they otherwise would have been, and he expects that to increase as the company grows. He said this high efficiency and productivity increases their quality, which can be booked as a profit or passed on to the customer by offering lower prices.
It has implemented this new approach in both its online markets and physical locations. Nyberg said the hybrid model is important because seeing and trying a vehicle in person is always important to the buying experience for many consumers — especially those who may be testing EVs for the first time.
Early reviews of the Ever product have been mixed. Users in a certain Reddit thread from last year were divided, with some enamored with how Ever makes EVs affordable, and others having problems with the details of communicating with the startup group. Ever was fresh off the ground and he was working slowly, so Nyberg chalked that up to reading. He said his team is working hard to make sure its system is flexible enough to accomplish everything the company aims to do.
The biggest challenge may be the overall interest in EVs, which has cooled slightly in the United States. Nyberg said he hasn’t ruled out Ever buying or selling electric vehicles in the future, but he wants to stick with EVs in the near term since there is no dealer focused on these vehicles.
Behl, who spent eight years on Rivian’s leadership team, admitted to being “a pessimist when it comes to EVs,” and said he still believes the industry is moving toward electric driving because of the benefits. And he said his “first thought” when he started working on Ever was: “I wish Rivian was doing this.”
Broadly, Behl said, companies like Carvana are still single-market numbers when it comes to selling cars. That’s why he sees things going well for Ever.
“Customers will continue to be inclined to buy cars, which means that there will be a digital-led experience that removes all the hassle of buying and selling a car,” he said.
