Startup Deep Dive : CARS24 — it sold 200,000 cars and still lost Rs 543 crore

CARS24 sold roughly two lakh used cars in FY24 and pulled in close to Rs 6,917 crore doing it, yet it still closed the year with a Rs 498 crore loss — and the year after that, revenue fell and the loss grew wider still. The company that promised to fix India’s messiest, most trust-starved marketplace has spent a decade proving that fixing trust is expensive.

It has raised more than a billion dollars from SoftBank, Tencent and DST Global, touched a $3.3 billion valuation, and is now reportedly worth less than a third of that as it prepares to list. Along the way it quietly built something more interesting than a car marketplace: a lending business bolted onto a trading business, and the two together explain almost everything about why CARS24 keeps growing and keeps losing money at the same time.

Quick facts

What they do

CARS24 buys used cars from individual owners, inspects and refurbishes them, and sells them on — either wholesale to a network of dealers through its own online auction platform, or directly to consumers through its retail app and physical hubs. Layered on top of that trading business sits CARS24 Financial Services, an RBI-licensed non-banking financial company that lends to both the dealers buying cars at auction and the retail customers buying from CARS24 directly. The company also sells two-wheelers under CARS24 Moto, and earns smaller amounts from motor insurance referrals and registration-transfer paperwork. In short: it is not a listings site where buyers and sellers find each other: it takes ownership of the car, prices the risk of holding and reselling it, and increasingly finances the transaction as well.

The origin

The idea traces back to a personal irritation. Vikram Chopra, an IIT Bombay engineering graduate with a Wharton MBA who had worked as a McKinsey business analyst and a Sequoia Capital investment analyst before co-founding the furniture e-commerce venture FabFurnish, ran into the ordinary chaos of selling a car in India: multiple middlemen, opaque pricing, and paperwork that could drag on for weeks. He teamed up with Mehul Agrawal, his FabFurnish co-founder and an IIM Calcutta graduate who had worked at Boston Consulting Group, along with Gajendra Jangid and Ruchit Agarwal, to build a platform that could give a seller a firm, same-day price and close the transaction on the spot. CARS24 launched in August 2015 in Gurugram and started with instant appraisals and on-the-spot payment in the Delhi–NCR region, betting that speed and certainty — not just a better listing — was the product used-car sellers actually wanted.

The struggle years

The first real shock was the COVID-19 lockdown of March 2020. Footfall at CARS24’s inspection points declined gradually for about a week and then collapsed to zero once the formal lockdown began; web traffic and customer leads thinned out sharply just as the company was scaling. The recovery was unusually fast for the sector — CARS24 said it had surpassed pre-COVID transaction levels by the third quarter of calendar 2020, with annual transactions crossing 200,000 units and web engagement up roughly fourfold, even as the wider auto industry stayed depressed.

The second shock was self-inflicted cash discipline arriving too late. In May 2022, just five months after closing a $400 million Series G round in December 2021 that valued the company at $3.3 billion, CARS24 let go of around 600 employees — about 6.6% of its roughly 9,000-strong workforce — describing it as routine “performance-linked exits.” The timing told a different story: capital markets for Indian startups were tightening fast in 2022, and CARS24 was cutting its monthly cash burn roughly in half, from about $20 million to about $10 million, to extend its runway.

The third was a retreat from its own global ambitions. Having expanded into the UAE, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Turkey and Australia between 2020 and 2021, CARS24 wound down operations in Indonesia and Saudi Arabia in 2023, affecting around 100 employees in Indonesia alone, and scaled back its Middle East and Thailand expansion plans to concentrate capital on India, the UAE and Australia. Even that narrower footprint kept churning: in April 2025 the company cut around 200 roles in product and technology, followed within weeks by roughly 120 more from non-core verticals, with management attributing the cuts to internal strategic missteps — projects launched too early, hypotheses that did not survive contact with the market — rather than to individual performance.

The turning point

The clearest before-and-after sits across FY22 and FY23. In FY22, CARS24 Services’ loss ballooned to Rs 1,093 crore even as revenue grew to Rs 5,137 crore, a period that coincided with the company’s most aggressive international expansion and heaviest marketing spend. A year later, after the May 2022 layoffs and the broader pullback in growth spending, the loss had fallen to Rs 468 crore on revenue of Rs 5,535 crore — a 57% reduction in losses on revenue that barely moved. That is the moment CARS24 stopped treating scale as the only goal and started treating unit economics as one: procurement costs were trimmed as a share of expenses, and the company began talking publicly about a path to profitability rather than just growth. It would not sustain that improvement — losses crept back up in the two years that followed — but FY22-to-FY23 is the year the company’s own numbers show it changing its operating stance.

The money behind it

CARS24 has raised a reported $1.08 billion across roughly a dozen rounds according to Tracxn, or as much as $1.3 billion across 17 rounds including debt facilities according to CB Insights — the gap reflects how each tracker counts debt tranches and subsidiary-level raises, but both agree the company has drawn in well over a billion dollars of capital. The rounds that mattered most: DST Global led the $200 million Series E in November 2020 that made CARS24 a unicorn for the first time, at a valuation just over $1 billion, giving the company capital to survive the pandemic and formalise its NBFC arm. SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and Alpha Wave Global (then Falcon Edge) co-led a $450 million Series F in September 2021 — $340 million in equity and $110 million in debt, with Tencent also participating — that nearly doubled the valuation to $1.84 billion and funded the international push into the UAE, Thailand and Australia. Three months later, in December 2021, SoftBank made its first direct investment through a $400 million Series G ($300 million equity, $100 million debt), taking the valuation to $3.3 billion — the company’s last publicly confirmed primary-round valuation, and its peak. CARS24 has not disclosed a new primary funding round since. As it now prepares for a public listing, its valuation is reported by Tracxn at roughly $1.03 billion in 2026 — a marked-down figure reflecting the broader repricing of late-stage Indian startups since 2022, though it has not been independently confirmed through a fresh primary transaction.

How it makes money

Money comes in from two related but different places. The larger one is trading cars: CARS24 pays a seller cash for their car, refurbishes it, and resells it — either wholesale, through an online auction where dealers bid and CARS24 keeps a commission on the winning bid, or retail, through its own app and showrooms at a markup. This auction-and-retail line makes up around 92% of revenue. The part that is easy to underestimate is the lending arm. CARS24 Financial Services, which has held an RBI non-banking financial company licence since July 2019, lends to the dealers buying inventory at auction and to consumers financing a retail purchase; it carried a loan book of roughly Rs 6,200 crore in FY25, and disbursed Rs 1,637 crore in loans in the first half of FY26 alone, up 38% year-on-year. Financial-services income was a modest Rs 215–300 crore of total revenue in FY24 and FY25 — a sliver next to the trading business — but industry analysts and the company’s own commentary point to lending carrying meaningfully better margins than buying and reselling cars, because CARS24 is pricing credit risk rather than absorbing depreciation risk on physical inventory. What most outsiders get wrong is treating CARS24 as a listings or classifieds platform like OLX or CarDekho, where the company merely connects a buyer and seller for a fee. It is not: CARS24 buys the car with its own balance sheet, holds it in inventory until it is sold, and eats the loss if the car’s value falls before that happens. That is closer to a used-car retailer with a fintech attached than a marketplace, and it is why procurement — buying the car in the first place — has consistently eaten more than 80% of the company’s total costs.

The numbers

Figures below are for CARS24 Services Private Limited, the India entity, as reported in its annual filings and covered by Entrackr and Business Standard; the wider Singapore-headquartered holding company that also housed the now-exited Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and Turkey operations reported far larger consolidated losses in the same period — Rs 1,834 crore on Rs 6,072 crore of revenue in FY22 alone — before those overseas units were wound down.

Two things stand out. First, FY25 was the first year in this run where revenue fell rather than rose — down about 10% from FY24 — even as the loss widened, which is a harder story for a pre-IPO company to tell than steady growth with shrinking losses. Second, procurement of cars alone accounted for Rs 5,555 crore, or 81% of total expenses, in FY25, which is why even a modest dip in resale volumes or prices shows up immediately in the bottom line. For context on scale, CARS24 said it sold around 200,000 cars in FY24; in the first half of FY26 it reported roughly 85,000 transactions across India, UAE and Australia combined, with adjusted net revenue up 18% year-on-year to Rs 651 crore and the adjusted EBITDA loss narrowing 36% to Rs 162 crore — figures that point to the improvement the company needs investors to believe in ahead of a listing.

Where the money comes from

By business line, the split is heavily skewed: auction and retail car sales delivered about 92% of CARS24’s India revenue in both FY24 and FY25, with financial-services income — largely interest on loans made through its NBFC — making up most of the rest, at roughly Rs 215 crore in FY25. By geography, India is overwhelmingly the core market; the company’s remaining international operations in the UAE and Australia are described by CARS24 itself as together delivering a minority of the roughly 85,000 transactions it counted in the first half of FY26, after Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and a broader Thailand push were abandoned. The surprise, again, is the financing side: it is a small share of revenue but carries the loan growth story — disbursals up 38% year-on-year in H1 FY26 — that CARS24 is using to argue its business is diversifying away from pure car-trading margins, even though trading still decides whether the company makes or loses money in any given quarter.

The risks

Three risks sit close to the surface. The first is inventory and price risk: because CARS24 buys cars outright rather than merely listing them, a fall in used-car prices between purchase and resale hits its books directly, and procurement already consumes over 80% of its costs, leaving very little room to absorb a price shock. The second is credit risk inside its own NBFC: CARS24 Financial Services lends against the same used cars it trades, so a downturn that hurts resale values also weakens the collateral behind its loan book, tightening two parts of the business at once — and the RBI’s revised Income Recognition, Asset Classification and Provisioning norms for NBFCs, effective from November 2025, raise the bar on how conservatively that book must be provisioned for. The third is competitive and structural: the Indian used-car market is large and growing — one industry estimate puts it near $31.6 billion in 2024, roughly doubling by 2029 — but it remains dominated by unorganised, informal resellers, and CARS24 itself has said it is targeting only around a 10% share of the organised segment over the next three to four years, competing directly against well-funded rivals such as Spinny and CarDekho, both also unicorns eyeing the same IPO window.

The takeaway

CARS24’s decade is a reminder that solving a trust problem by absorbing the risk yourself — buying the car, not just listing it; lending the money, not just referring the buyer to a bank — can build a much bigger business than a pure marketplace, but it also means you can never fully escape the thing you built the company to fix: price risk on a physical asset that depreciates the moment you own it. Growth alone did not fix that; only sustained cost discipline came close, and even that discipline slipped once market conditions eased. The lesson generalises beyond cars: taking on the friction competitors avoid is a genuine moat, but it is also a permanent tax on the balance sheet, and no amount of revenue growth substitutes for actually pricing that risk correctly.

Frequently asked questions

Is CARS24 a listing website like OLX or a classifieds platform?

No. CARS24 buys used cars directly from sellers, refurbishes them, and resells them through its own auction and retail channels, taking on inventory and price risk itself rather than simply connecting buyers and sellers for a fee.

Who founded CARS24 and when?

CARS24 was founded in August 2015 in Gurugram by Vikram Chopra, Mehul Agrawal, Ruchit Agarwal and Gajendra Jangid, with Chopra and Agrawal having previously co-founded the furniture e-commerce venture FabFurnish.

Has CARS24 ever been profitable?

No annual profit has been reported in the years for which its financials are public. Losses at the India entity ran from Rs 1,093 crore in FY22 down to Rs 468 crore in FY23, before rising again to Rs 498 crore in FY24 and Rs 543 crore in FY25.

Who are CARS24’s biggest investors?

Its largest backers include SoftBank Vision Fund 2, DST Global, Alpha Wave Global (formerly Falcon Edge) and Tencent, alongside dozens of other institutional investors across more than a decade of fundraising.

Is CARS24 planning to go public?

As of 2026, CARS24 is reported to be preparing for an initial public offering within 12 to 18 months, alongside rival used-car platforms Spinny and CarDekho, though it had not filed a formal draft prospectus with India’s securities regulator at the time of writing.

Sources

Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).

• Entrackr, “Cars24 reports 10% revenue decline in FY25; losses rise marginally,” February 2026
• Entrackr, “Cars24 sells 2 lakh cars in FY24, revenue nears Rs 7,000 Cr,” November 2024
• Business Standard, “Cars24 reports revenue of Rs 5,535 cr in FY23, 8% increase from FY22,” October 2023
• Entrackr, “Cars24’s gross revenue surges 2.2X in FY22, losses cross Rs 1,800 Cr” (consolidated Singapore holding-company figures), January 2023
• Entrackr, “Cars24 scale remains flat in FY23, losses declines 57%,” October 2023
• Business Standard, “Cars24 raises $400 mn in funding, valuation up 83% at $3.3 bn in 3 months,” December 2021
• Business Standard, “Cars24 valuation soars to $1.8 billion after raising $450 million,” September 2021
• Business Standard, “Newest unicorn in town: Cars24 raises $200 mn in Series-E funding,” November 2020
• CB Insights, CARS24 company financials profile, accessed September 2026
• Tracxn, CARS24 funding, investors and valuation profile, accessed September 2026
• Business Today, “Cars24 fires 600 employees, calls it ‘business as usual’,” May 2022
• Business Standard, “Cars24 lay-offs: 200 employees, expansion project,” April 2025
• Inc42, “Exclusive: CARS24 To Fire 120 More Employees In Restructuring Exercise,” 2025
• The Morning Context, “Cars24 exits Indonesia and Saudi Arabia,” 2023
• Inc42, “CARS24’s Global Expansion: India to UAE & Australia Explained”
• StartupTalky, “CARS24 Success Story: Founders, Business Model, Funding, Revenue”
• Wikipedia, “CARS24,” accessed September 2026
• Angel One, “CARS24 Prepares for IPO as Focus Shifts to Profitability and Growth,” 2026
• Medianama, “Exclusive: Cars24 Acquires CarInfo Ahead of Potential IPO,” January 2026
• Inc42, “The Indian Startup IPO Tracker 2026”
• Entrackr, “The transformative journey of used car startups in India: Report,” April 2024
• Revelio Labs, CARS24 Services employee headcount data, accessed September 2026
• Inc42, “Cars24, Droom, Spinny: How India’s Used-Car Startups Compare”
• Forbes India, “Cars24 takes the global route”

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