If you want to buy or sell a used EV right now, what do you do first?
A startup called Ever wants to be the answer to that question. The company bills itself as the first “AI-native, full-stack auto retail business” for electric vehicles, and already has thousands of customers buying and selling EVs on its platform.
The company is currently looking to expand with the support 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 helped introduce a digital car buying experience. These days, countless startups are trying to use AI to improve the car-buying experience, proposing ideas like voice agents and smarter scheduling software. But 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 a Band-Aid,” he said in an interview with TechCrunch. He likened it to how many major automakers’ first EVs were essentially internal combustion engine cars repackaged to fit electric drivetrains. This approach involved significant tradeoffs compared to designing new EVs from scratch, an approach taken by companies like Tesla and Rivian.
“Automotive retail is a great company to disrupt with AI. As we know, it takes a lot of processes and effort. [very] It’s rule-based,” he said.
Ever co-founder and CEO Lasse Mathias Nyberg said in an interview that buying or selling a car typically triggers “hundreds or thousands of different actions” that retailers need to perform to complete the transaction. “There are very complex issues and frictions on both sides.”
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In 2022, he and his team set out to reduce or eliminate these complexities. After a year of research, they arrived at a digital-first auto retailer. The core technology is an orchestration layer or “operating system” that can handle all the various workflows behind a transaction, such as processing information submitted by prospective buyers or sellers and managing vehicle inventory.
“The steps you need to take when it comes to valuation, pricing and entitlement are very decisive, and there are a lot of single-point solution tools in use today,” he said. Most companies think they’re on the verge of digitalization because they’re using these tools together in a very inefficient way, but if you can actually clean sheet that and actually harness the power of agent AI, you can create one unified customer experience and remove all these micro-friction.
Nyberg claims that by building the company this way, Ever’s sales team is two to three times more productive than other methods, and he expects the benefits to grow as the company grows. He said this extra efficiency and productivity increases margins, which can be recorded as profit or passed on to customers by offering lower prices.
We apply this novel approach to both online marketplaces and physical locations. Nyberg said the hybrid model is important because for many buyers, especially those evaluating EVs for the first time, seeing and trying the car in person remains important to the shopping experience.
Early reviews of Ever’s products have been mixed. Users in a particular thread on Reddit last year were divided, with some drawn to how Ever was making it easier to buy EVs, while others detailed their struggles getting in touch with the startup’s team. It was a learning experience, Nyberg said, because Eber had just taken off and was operating more or less in stealth. He said his team is working hard to make sure the system is flexible enough to accomplish everything the company is trying to do.
The bigger challenge may be overall interest in EVs, which has cooled a bit in the US. Nyberg said he hasn’t ruled out the possibility of EVA buying and selling used combustion vehicles in the future, but said he wants to stick with EVs in the short term as there are no retailers focused on these vehicles.
Bale, who spent eight years on Rivian’s executive team, admitted he is a “hopeless romantic when it comes to EVs” and said he still believes the industry is moving toward electric propulsion because of its inherent benefits. And he said his “first thought” when he started working hard on Ever was, “I wish Rivian was doing this.”
More broadly, when it comes to auto retail, companies like Carvana still have single-digit market share, Bale said. That’s why he thinks Ever has so many positive aspects.
“Customers will continue to demand a better experience when it comes to buying and selling cars, which means a digitally-driven customer experience that removes all the friction associated with buying and selling cars,” he said.
