If you want to buy or sell a used electric vehicle right now, what is the first step you would take? A startup called Ever wants to be the answer to that question. The company bills itself as the first AI-native, full-stack auto retail business for electric vehicles, and it already has thousands of customers using its platform.
Now Ever is looking to scale its operations with help from a 31 million dollar Series A funding round. The round was led by Eclipse, with co-investors Ibex Investors, Lifeline Ventures, and JIMCO, which is the investment arm of the Saudi Arabian Jameel family, an early investor in Rivian.
Over the last decade, companies like Carvana and Carmax helped create the digital car-buying experience. More recently, many startups have tried to improve car buying with AI, offering ideas like voice agents or scheduling software. However, Eclipse’s Jiten Behl believes this is the wrong approach to truly modernize automotive retail. He calls these bolt-on AI tools band-aids. He compared it to how many automakers’ first electric vehicles were essentially repackaged combustion vehicles, an approach with major tradeoffs compared to building an EV from the ground up, as Tesla and Rivian did.
Behl stated that auto retail is a perfect candidate for disruption with AI because it involves a lot of process, labor, and rules-based tasks.
Lasse-Mathias Nyberg, co-founder and CEO of Ever, explained that buying or selling a car typically triggers hundreds or thousands of different actions a retailer must perform. He noted there are massive complexities and frictions on both sides of the transaction.
In 2022, Nyberg and his team set out to reduce those complexities. After a year of research, they settled on creating a digital-first auto retailer. The core technology is an orchestration layer, or operating system, that handles all the different workflows behind a transaction, from processing customer information to managing vehicle inventory.
Nyberg said that tasks like appraisals, pricing, or titling are very deterministic, with clear steps that need to be taken. He argued that most companies use a patchwork of single-solution tools inefficiently. By starting with a clean sheet and using the power of agentic AI, Ever aims to create a unified customer experience and remove all these micro-frictions.
Nyberg claims this approach has made Ever’s sales team two to three times more productive than they would otherwise be, and he expects that advantage to scale. This extra efficiency improves margins, which can be kept as profit or passed to customers through lower prices.
Ever applies this approach to both its online marketplace and its physical locations. Nyberg said the hybrid model is important because seeing and trying a car in person remains crucial for many buyers, especially those considering an EV for the first time.
Early reviews of Ever’s product have been mixed. In user discussions from last year, some were drawn to how Ever makes EVs easier to buy, while others detailed struggles getting in touch with the company’s team. Nyberg notes that Ever was just getting off the ground and operating mostly in stealth at the time, and he views that period as a learning experience. His team is working to ensure the system is flexible enough to achieve the company’s goals.
A bigger challenge may be the overall cooling of interest in EVs within the United States. Nyberg said he has not ruled out Ever buying or selling used combustion cars in the future, but wants to stick to EVs in the near term since no other retailer is laser-focused on these vehicles.
Jiten Behl, who spent eight years on Rivian’s leadership team, admitted he is a hopeless romantic when it comes to EVs. He said he still believes the industry is moving toward electric propulsion because of the inherent benefits. His first thought when he began evaluating Ever was that he wished Rivian was doing this.
More broadly, Behl noted that companies like Carvana still only have single-digit market share in automotive retail. That is why he sees so much potential in Ever. He believes customers will continue to gravitate toward a better experience when buying cars, which means a digitally-led customer experience that removes all the friction of buying and selling a car.