PHOENIX--(BUSINESS WIRE)--
Thirty-three markets and five Car Vending Machines strong, Carvana
(NYSE: CVNA) has pioneered the new way to buy a car. Today, Carvana is
proud to announce it has acquired fellow automotive disruptor, Carlypso,
to further enhance Carvana’s momentum.
Initially established as a peer-to-peer car selling service, Carlypso
evolved into a managed marketplace, giving consumers direct access to
wholesale inventory. Carlypso focused on ingesting, normalizing and
organizing data on vehicles that they could not physically inspect, and
scaling that process to analyze over 200,000 cars each day. The company
developed proprietary big data, analytics, and machine learning tools to
dynamically filter, value and price cars nearly instantaneously without
ever actually seeing them; tools that can integrate with similarly
purposed proprietary technology Carvana has created.
"We've admired what Carlypso has been doing from a distance, and when
they walked us through the technology, we realized how unique their
solutions were,” said Ernie Garcia, Carvana founder and CEO. “Seeing
Carlypso's ability to scour disparate data sources to better understand
each vehicle, to leverage that data to understand the relative value of
vehicles and to turn that into actionable intelligence in real time with
local market context to efficiently acquire vehicles on behalf of
customers, made it clear to us that we would be a great team.”
Carlypso co-founders Chris Coleman and Nicky Hinrichsen have assumed
leadership roles at Carvana. Coleman is overseeing vehicle data
acquisition and normalization. Hinrichsen is running wholesale and trade
technology. Both are contributing to Carvana’s strategies for
centralized inventory acquisition, as well as instant valuation offers
for consumers looking to sell or trade in their vehicle.
“When studying wholesale and retail prices in late 2014, we
serendipitously discovered abnormally high spreads on some vehicles,
which presented amazing deals for our customers,” said Coleman. “We
became obsessed with decoding opaque vehicle data to extreme accuracy in
order to find a wider range of inefficiencies in the market. We’d
transitioned from an online car dealer to a data science company.
Bringing our insights to Carvana, the biggest disruptor in our business,
meant we could keep innovating with even more horsepower.”
Bringing a wealth of knowledge and experience to the Carvana team,
Coleman and Hinrichsen founded Carlypso while completing their MBAs at
Stanford University. Inspired by other tech disruptors like Airbnb and
Dropbox, Coleman and Hinrichsen joined Silicon Valley’s most renowned
technology startup incubator, YCombinator, in 2014.
Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
About Carvana (NYSE: CVNA)
Founded in 2012 and based in Phoenix, Carvana’s (NYSE: CVNA) mission is
to change the way people buy cars. By removing the traditional
dealership infrastructure and replacing it with technology and
exceptional customer service, Carvana offers consumers an intuitive and
convenient online automotive retail platform, with a fully transactional
website that enables consumers to quickly and easily buy a car online,
including finding their preferred vehicle, qualifying for financing,
completing the purchase and loan with signed contracts, and receiving
delivery or pickup of the vehicle from one of Carvana’s proprietary
automated Car Vending Machines.
For further information on Carvana, please visit www.carvana.com,
or connect with us on Facebook,
Instagram
or Twitter.
View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170808005449/en/
Carvana
Kate Carver, 212-656-9148
[email protected]
Source: Carvana
