Eclipse is backing the all-electric vehicle market ever in a $31 million funding round

If you wanted to buy or sell a used electric car now, what is the first step you would take?

A startup called Ever wants to be the answer to that question. The company, which bills itself as the first “integrated, AI-driven auto retailer” for electric vehicles, already has thousands of customers buying and selling their electric vehicles on the platform.

It is now looking to expand with the help of a $31 million Series A funding round led by Eclipse, with Ibex Investors, Lifeline Ventures and JIMCO – the investment arm of the Saudi Jameel family (an early investor in Rivian) – as co-investors.

Over the past decade, companies like Carvana and Carmax have helped usher in the digital car buying experience. Recently, countless startups have been trying to improve the car buying experience using AI, coming up with ideas like voice agents or smarter scheduling software. Eclipse’s Jiten Behl believes this is the wrong approach if you really want to modernize the auto retail experience.

“These proven AI tools are enablers,” he said in an interview with TechCrunch. He likened this to the number of first electric cars made by major automakers that were essentially combustion vehicles repackaged to fit electric drives. This approach came with significant trade-offs compared to designing a new electric car from the ground up, which is the approach taken by companies like Tesla and Rivian.

“Automotive retail is a perfect candidate for disruption with AI, you know? It’s a lot of processes, a lot of labor, [very] “Based on the rules,” he said.

Buying or selling a car typically triggers “hundreds or thousands of different actions” that a retailer needs to perform in order to complete the deal, Lasse-Mathias Nyberg, co-founder and CEO of Ever, said in an interview. “There are tremendous complications or friction on both sides.”

In 2022, he and his team set out to reduce or eliminate those complications. What they settled on after a year of research was a digital-first car retailer. The underlying technology is an orchestration layer or “operating system” that can handle all the different workflows behind a transaction, whether it’s processing information provided by a potential buyer or seller, or managing vehicle inventory.

“When you’re valuing, pricing, or owning, it’s very deterministic in terms of the steps that need to be taken. Today, there are a lot of single-point solution tools being used,” he said. Most companies “use these tools together in a very inefficient way, and you think you’re on a digital journey — but if you can actually clean them up, if you can actually harness the power of agent AI, you can create one unified customer experience and remove all of those micro-frictions.”

Nyberg claimed that building the company this way allowed Ever’s sales team to be two to three times more productive than they could have been otherwise, and he expects this to expand as the company grows. This extra efficiency and productivity boosts profit margins, which can be recorded as profit or passed on to the customer by offering lower prices, he said.

It always applies this fresh approach to both its online marketplace and its physical locations. The hybrid model is important because seeing and trying the car in person remains crucial to the shopping experience for many buyers — especially those who may be evaluating electric vehicles for the first time, Nyberg said.

Early reviews of the Ever product were mixed. Users were divided on a particular Reddit thread from last year, with some drawn to how easy it was to purchase EVs from Ever, while others detailed the difficulties in communicating with the startup’s team. Ever was just taking off and was more or less working undercover, so Nyberg credits that to a learning experience. He said his team is working hard to make sure its system can be flexible enough to accomplish everything the company sets out to do.

The biggest challenge may be public interest in electric vehicles, which has declined slightly in the United States. Nyberg said he doesn’t rule out buying or selling used combustion vehicles in the future, but wants to commit to electric vehicles in the near term since there’s no retailer laser-focused on those vehicles.

Biehl, who spent eight years on Rivian’s leadership team, admitted he is a “hopeless romantic when it comes to electric vehicles” and said he still believes the industry is moving toward electric propulsion because of the inherent benefits. He said his “first thought” when he started putting the effort into the Ever was: “I wish Rivian was doing that.”

More broadly, Biehl said, companies like Carvana are still in the single digits in market share when it comes to auto retail. That’s why he sees so much upside in Ever.

“Customers will continue to gravitate towards a better experience when it comes to buying cars, which means it will be a digitally-led customer experience that removes all the friction involved in buying and selling a car,” he said.