Aaron Tan was 13 when he started making money. He built websites and sold them. It began in Singapore, where he grew up, with a kid who had worked out that something he could make was something others would pay for.
Years later he studied computer science at Carnegie Mellon, where he met Aditya Lesmana and Kelvin Chng. He then worked as a venture capitalist in the United States. In that job he met car-related companies such as Beepi, Uber and DriveShift and saw momentum in the American used-car market. Back home the picture was different. Southeast Asia's used-car market was opaque, with middlemen and little way for a buyer to know whether a deal was good.
Carro bought cars, inspected them and sold them on, which meant taking inventory risk to earn trust.
In 2015 he returned to Singapore and brought his classmates with him. He has described it as selling them the opportunity: a chance to build an algorithm that could clear up the market, rather than carry on with what they were doing. Carro was founded that year.
The early model was not a listings site. Carro bought cars, inspected them and sold them on, which meant taking inventory risk to earn trust. Over time it layered on financing and, in 2019, Singapore's first car subscription service.
The turn came in 2021. By March, revenue was about US$300 million, roughly 2.5 times the prior year, and the company said it was profitable. In June, SoftBank Vision Fund 2 led a US$360 million Series C that took the valuation past US$1 billion. At the time Tan told CNBC he planned to go public within 12 to 18 months. A Temasek and PNB-led round of more than US$100 million followed late that year, with Sime Darby, Shinhan and Mirae Asset joining.
The listing did not arrive on that schedule. In September 2025 Carro raised US$60 million from Japan's Cool Japan Fund, and Tan said at an event that the company was preparing to list but had not chosen where.
The lesson is old but still true. Tan did not invent a new market. He noticed a broken one while working somewhere else, then went home and recruited friends who trusted him enough to follow. That trust, more than the algorithm, is what he had to sell first.