The co-founder and group CEO of Carro on how he's using AI to disrupt the used car market
The pandemic has shaken up most industries, leaving some struggling to rebuild, and others embracing the disruption and going fully digital.
Globally, the used car industry is booming thanks to the pandemic, as people are motivated to buy their own ride to avoid public transport. One of the companies reaping the rewards of the demand boost and digital acceleration is Carro, an online car marketplace offering end-to-end services for all aspects of car ownership.
According to group CEO Aaron Tan, who started the company in 2015 with his co-founders Aditya Lesmana and Kelvin Chng, Carro’s latest sales turnover is nearly US$300 million. Earlier this year, it was named the fastest-growing company in Asia-Pacific in an analysis jointly conducted by the Financial Times, Nikkei and Statista. In the region, Carro has presence in Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. More recently, the company hit unicorn status when it raised US$360 million in a Softbank-led Series C funding round.
Since 2016, Carro’s staff has grown from just 10 to almost 900 today, says Tan, spread across seven countries worldwide. It has also raised over US$180 million in funding from global investors such as Softbank Ventures Asia, Mitsubishi Corp and EDBI.
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As an entrepreneur who started two tech businesses before Carro, Tan doesn’t shy away from trying new things. So when the pandemic began last year, he reassessed Carro’s business model and led the team to find new ways to improve the company’s services using technology.
This resulted in innovations such as making the purchasing experience of its used cars contactless, and using AI to calculate the premiums of its auto insurance based on a driver’s behaviour and level of usage. Carro also uses AI to scan cars for potential problems before mechanics check them for defects, reducing human error by up to 80 percent.
Tan has been programming since he was a teen over two decades ago. His first idea was to build a search engine, after he logged into Yahoo! for the first time in 1995 when he was just 11 years old.