Amit Jain is best known for being the founder and CEO of CarDekho — India’s leading car search venture. He is set to gain tremendous fame as he appears in the new season of Shark Tank India.
Born on 12th November 1976 in Jaipur, he studied in St. Xaviers and later moved to Delhi to pursue a B.Tech degree from IIT Delhi. Shortly after graduating in 1999, he worked as a Software Engineer at Tata Consultancy Services for a year.
Soon after that in the year 2000, he moved to the USA to work as a Senior Associate for a company based in Austin, Texas called Trilogy– a company specialising in software products. He later managed to acquire the post of Delivery Manager and subsequently went on to become a Product Manager.
Pushing through adversities
Amit worked at Trilogy for about 6 years before coming back to India to the unfortunate news of his father passing away due to cancer. This was the time when he and his brother, Anurag Jain, both came to Jaipur, their hometown, and started to work on building a company. This led to the inception of an IT Service company called GirnarSOFT in 2007.
Two brothers working on a project together, with dreams as big as the ocean, it all started in a small office that they put together in the garage of their house. The two brothers expanded their workforce and hired around 30-40 people by the end of 2007.
“The big dream I was chasing was nothing but a billion-dollar company,” says Amit in an interview with Shradha Sharma. The year it was launched, GirnarSOFT experienced massive success and made a lot of profit. The company even started getting outsourcing projects from America.
But in 2008, they suffered a disheartening loss of Rs. 1 Cr in the stock market, leaving them feeling defeated.
His journey toward CarDekho
Despite this huge financial loss, giving up was never an option for him and his brother. But they thankfully had enough funds to start investing in a new product, which was CarDekho.
They both were into cars and went to an Auto Expo in 2008. This is when they realised that the Expo was not available online and their immense passion for cars drove them to start this business.
At the Expo, they collected all the brochures and put them into an excel sheet, and made a database. Amit wrote the code along with a few freshers in the company and within one and a half months of conceptualizing it, in April 2008, CarDekho was ready to be out there for the world to see.
The road was rather shaky and they had to put up with around 9-10 failures during that time celebrating failures along with successes sort of became the norm for the company.
What is CarDekho?
So many things go into the decision-making process of buying a car— the specifications, the price range, your budget, the vehicle design and size, the inevitable pros and cons, and the extensive amount of research about the car itself.
Evidently, it’s not child’s play. Also, if you’re an indecisive person like me, you probably need CarDekho’s assistance to make the right choice.
CarDekho is an online auto portal that is dedicated to suggesting the right cars for its users to buy. It also enables anyone to sell their own car through the website. You can also get your hands on used cars.
Success Story of CarDekho
The company has collaborated with many automobile manufacturers such as Toyota, Tata, Maruti, Hyundai, etc. CarDekho provides expert reviews, detailed specifications and prices, live offers, comparison videos and so much more.
They also have some of the most impressive features created with the help of augmented reality such as online showrooms and a Feel The Car tool. Want to know what it’s like to roam around in a new car? This tool provides you with a 360-degree view of the interior and exterior of any car you want, and it includes the sound of the car too!
Following the launch of CarDekho, Amit has co-founded several ventures such as BikeDekho, PriceDekho, CollegeDekho, InsuranceDekho, etc.
The brothers were ridiculed by their friends upon hearing the seemingly absurd statement of their wanting to make a billion-dollar company. But “dekho where they are today” with CarDekho. It is valued at $1.2 billion, making their dream a fantastic reality.
“We persevered and bootstrapped for 7 long years, made CarDekho profitable, eventually secured Series-A funding of $15 Million in 2013, and grew to what we are today, a unicorn with a valuation of $ 1.2 billion,” says Amit Jain.
