It began over coffee. Niraj Singh and Ramanshu Mahaur were talking about something that had nothing to do with startups: how many of their friends had bought a used car, and how miserable it had been.
The stories were all the same. Friends trudged from dealer to dealer, haggled over prices that never felt reasonable, and drove home with a car they could not fully trust. They did not have a bad purchase, Niraj later wrote, so much as 'a sense of doubt about the quality of their purchase.' That doubt stuck with him. He and Ramanshu took the idea to Mohit Gupta and Ganesh Pawar, and all four, in his telling, became convinced it was their next venture. Reports describe Niraj as an IIT Delhi alumnus who put in about $500,000 of his own money to begin.
Friends trudged from dealer to dealer, haggled over prices that never felt reasonable, and drove home with a car they could not fully trust.
The first version, in 2015, was an obvious one: a marketplace where owners could list cars for other individuals to buy. It did not work. Used cars are a business of mistrust, and a website that merely connects strangers does nothing about that. 'The presence of information asymmetry throughout the market quickly became apparent to us,' Niraj wrote. Buyers could not see what the seller knew.
So in 2017 the founders did the harder thing. Instead of introducing buyers to sellers, Spinny would stand in the middle. It would buy cars, put each through a 200-point inspection, price it with its own engine, offer a money-back guarantee, and handle the loan, the title transfer and the delivery. Ten months into the first model they had listed more than 3,000 cars and inspected over 100 a day. The retail model was far heavier on capital, and it had to be: every car Spinny owned was cash sitting in a lot.
That is where the price shows. In FY23 the company lost ₹820 Cr. Marketing spend that year was ₹424 Cr; by FY25 it had been cut to ₹125 Cr, and employee costs fell from ₹392 Cr to ₹338 Cr. Procurement of cars is still about 80% of everything it spends. Sourcing carries its own risks, from dodgy paperwork to hidden accident damage, and refurbishment and re-registration add delay and cost.
The discipline has started to show. In FY25, Spinny's revenue rose 25% to ₹4,657 Cr and its loss narrowed 28% to ₹424 Cr. In June 2025 it raised $170 Mn led by Accel's growth fund at a valuation of roughly $1.7-1.8 Bn, and it is reported to have confidentially filed for an IPO.
The lesson is in the sequence. The founders started with a problem a friend could describe in one sentence, tried the cheap solution, watched it fail for a specific reason, and then paid for the expensive one. Trust was the product all along, and it cost money to build.