In April 2026, two of the four people who started Cars24 left their operating jobs in the same week. Mehul Agrawal gave up the COO role and Gajendra Jangid left as chief marketing officer. The company was preparing for an IPO. It was an odd moment for a goodbye, and a fair place to start the story.
The four founders came from different worlds. Vikram Chopra studied at IIT Bombay and then at the University of Pennsylvania, and worked at McKinsey and Sequoia. Agrawal had been at BCG and had built the online furniture company FabFurnish. Chopra was an early part of it. Jangid, another IIT Bombay graduate, came from Schlumberger. Ruchit Agarwal, a Cornell graduate, had been a vice president at Bank of America Merrill Lynch.In 2015 they set up Cars24. They looked at the used-car market and saw what they called 'utter chaos': no standard way to buy or sell and no technology for pricing. The answer was to inspect cars, quote a price and close the deal fast. By 2019 it had 202 branches in 73 cities and sold about 150,000 cars a year. A buyback guarantee added trust.
Vikram Chopra studied at IIT Bombay and then at the University of Pennsylvania, and worked at McKinsey and Sequoia.
Then the money arrived. DST put $200 million in November 2020 at a $1 billion valuation. Through 2021 came further rounds from SoftBank, Tencent and Alpha Wave, and a $400 million round that December at $3.3 billion. Cars24 went into the UAE, Thailand and Australia.
The bill came due fast. In December 2021 it shut supply-focused businesses in about 82 Indian cities. In May 2022 it laid off about 600 people. Senior executives left. India revenue then fell for two straight years after peaking in FY24, to about ₹6,233 crore in FY25, with a net loss of ₹543 crore.
The recovery story is told by the company. For FY26 it reports adjusted net revenue of ₹1,411 crore, a smaller loss of ₹363 crore, and ₹20 crore of adjusted EBITDA in the last quarter, which it calls its first profitable one. Those numbers are unaudited. Chopra said in January the company hoped to list within six to twelve months.
The lesson is uncomfortable for anyone chasing growth. Easy capital made Cars24 big in months, and shrinking back to something that earns money took years and cost people their jobs.