The idea started at a car show. In January 2008, Amit and Anurag Jain went to the Delhi Auto Expo and left with a problem: buying a car in India meant too much guesswork. The brothers wanted to make it easier. By March that year CarDekho.com was live, launched, as one profile tells it, from a garage.
They were not outsiders to technology. Both studied at IIT Delhi, Amit in civil engineering and Anurag in mathematics and computing. They had gone to St. Xavier's School in Jaipur. Amit had worked at TCS and Trilogy as a product manager, and Anurag at i2 Technologies and Sabre. Together they ran GirnarSoft, an IT consultancy, which meant they had a way to pay the bills while an idea took shape.
Both studied at IIT Delhi, Amit in civil engineering and Anurag in mathematics and computing.
They did not quit it. This is the unglamorous part of the story. The consultancy kept running, giving steady income while CarDekho grew. The first push for clients was by phone and email, and it was slow. The first client came through, and brought referrals. A third co-founder, Umang Kumar of Gaadi.com, later joined when CarDekho bought his company in 2014.
The site gained audience. By January 2012 it counted 2.5 crore visitors. It moved from listings into new cars, dealerships and eventually finance and insurance, and bought companies along the way: Carmudi Philippines in 2019, Revv in 2023. A $70 million round from Ping An's fund in December 2019 and a $200 million round led by LeapFrog in October 2021 funded the push.
Then reality set in. In September 2021 it shut more than 20 used-car stores to move to home inspections. Losses ran for years, from ₹343 crore in FY21 to ₹640 crore in FY24 on the figures of one profile, even as revenue climbed. The picture has improved: FY25 consolidated revenue was ₹2,795 crore, up 24 per cent, with the group's loss narrowing to about ₹266 crore and the standalone entity reporting a profit.
The IPO has been in the pipeline for some time, with reports of a ₹3,500 crore or larger offering, but a listing date has not been confirmed.
The lesson here is quiet. The Jains did not bet everything on the new idea on day one. They kept the old business paying the bills until the new one could stand on its own, and in doing so bought themselves the years it took for CarDekho to become real.