Buying a vehicle online is pretty sweet. If you disagree, then you probably aren’t a good fit for Ekho; please return to your rock, luddite. For those remaining: the numbers support our belief. Carvana will sell a record high of 800,000 cars online in 2026 (making up around 2% of the total number of used cars sold in the US per year). Moreover, studies show that online vehicle shoppers - like Carvana buyers - report the highest satisfaction rate out of all shoppers. Pretty compelling stuff if you ask us. Thus, our conclusion: buying a vehicle online is pretty sweet.
The obvious followup is ‘why don’t more vehicles get bought online’? Well, it turns out it’s pretty hard to do. Just check out your local dealership website - you’ll most likely see ‘Get My Quote’ buttons on inventory pages rather than ‘Buy Now’ buttons. The horror!
To many people’s surprise, dealers don’t forgo ‘Buy Now’ buttons because they hate the idea of online sales. Quite the opposite: dealers are savvy businessmen and women who can see the success of Carvana and want to emulate their tactics. The true reason blocking the ‘buy now’ button is boring (and hard): taxes, financing, insurance, titling, and registration differ by state and county and most dealers have no reliable way to sell across state lines, so they don’t.
We built Ekho to solve this problem for dealers and manufacturers. Using our technology, a buyer can find a vehicle they like on a dealer or manufacturer site, click ‘Buy Now’, do financing and insurance online, and the vehicle will show up at their door a few days later. The dealer barely has to lift a finger.
Getting here took 24 months of untangling county-by-county titling rules, getting licenses in states Rowan (our South African cofounder) can’t pinpoint on a map, and hooking into 50 state DMV systems, some of which still prefer faxes to APIs. Building this compliance foundation was not sexy, but we’re now on the other side. Now, we get to do the fun stuff: we’re adding AI, moving into cars (we started with motorcycles), and are making the whole thing work in the store as well as online. The moat here isn’t code. It’s the compliance framework, the DMV relationships, and the licenses we spent years accruing. Your move, Anthropic.
We’re 34 people in a Flatiron office four days a week - nine of us engineers - with a Claude Code budget only Nadim polices. He can’t catch all of us. If this at all sounds interesting, come talk to us.