If you want 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 “AI-native, full-stack auto retail business” for electric vehicles, already has thousands of customers buying and selling their EVs on the platform.
Now it’s 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 last decade, companies like Carvana and CarMax helped usher in the digital car-buying experience. More recently, myriad startups have tried to improve the car-buying experience with AI, pitching ideas like voice agents or smarter scheduling software. Eclipse’s Jiten Behl thinks this is the wrong approach if you want to really modernize the automotive retail experience, though.
“These bolt-on AI tools are band-aids,” he said in an interview with TechCrunch. He likened it to how many major automakers’ first EVs were essentially combustion vehicles that were repackaged to fit electric drivetrains. That approach came with major tradeoffs compared to designing a new EV from the ground up, which was the approach companies like Tesla and Rivian took.
“Auto retail is a perfect candidate for disrupting with AI, you know? It’s a lot of process, lot of labor, [very] rules-based,” he said.
Lasse-Mathias Nyberg, Ever co-founder and CEO, said in an interview that buying or selling a car typically triggers “hundreds or thousands of different actions” that a retailer needs to perform in order to complete the transaction. “There’s massive complexities or frictions on both sides.”
In 2022, he and his team set out to reduce or remove those complexities. What they settled on after a year of research was a digital-first auto retailer. The core tech 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 the vehicle inventory.
“When you do appraisals, or pricing, or titling, it’s very deterministic in terms of what steps need to be taken. And today, there are lots of single point solution tools that are used,” he said. Most companies “use these tools together in a very inefficient manner, and you think that you are on a digital journey — but if you actually could clean-sheet it, and if you actually could use the power of agentic AI, and you can create one unified customer experience and remove all these 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 be otherwise, and he expects that to scale as the company grows. He said this extra efficiency and productivity beefs up their margins, which can be booked as profit or passed along to the customer by offering lower prices.
Ever applies this fresh approach to both its online marketplace and physical locations. Nyberg said the hybrid model is important because seeing and trying a car in person remains crucial to the shopping experience for a lot of buyers — especially those who might be assessing EVs for the first time.
Early reviews of Ever’s product have been mixed. Users on one particular Reddit thread from last year were split, with some drawn to how Ever is making EVs easier to buy, while others detailed struggles getting in touch with the startup’s team. Ever was just getting off the ground and was more or less operating in stealth, and so Nyberg chalks that up to a learning experience. He said his team is working hard to make sure its system can be flexible enough to accomplish everything the company has set out to do.
The bigger challenge may be overall interest in EVs, 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 wants to stick to EVs in the near-term since there isn’t a retailer that is laser-focused on these vehicles.
Behl, who spent eight years on Rivian’s leadership team, admitted he’s a “hopeless romantic when it comes to EVs,” and said he still believes the industry is moving toward electric propulsion because of the inherent benefits. And he said his “first thought” when he started doing diligence on Ever was: “I wish Rivian was doing this.”
More broadly, Behl said, companies like Carvana are still in the single digits of market share when it comes to automotive retail. That’s why he sees so much upside in Ever.
“Customers are going to continue to gravitate towards better experience when it comes to buying cars, which means it is going to be a digitally-led customer experience which takes away all the friction of buying and selling a car,” he said.