Buying a used EV shouldn’t be this complicated. You’d think in 2025 we’d have figured out how to make car shopping less miserable, but here we are, still dealing with the same friction that’s plagued the industry for decades. A startup called Ever thinks it has the solution, and it just raised $31 million to prove it.
The Series A round was led by Eclipse, with Ibex Investors, Lifeline Ventures, and JIMCO jumping in as co-investors. JIMCO is the investment arm of Saudi Arabia’s Jameel family, who got in early on Rivian, so they know a thing or two about betting on electric vehicles. The pitch? Ever wants to be the first place you think of when buying or selling a used EV, powered by AI baked into every part of the business.
The Tesla Approach to Car Retail
Eclipse’s Jiten Behl has a pretty blunt take on most AI car-buying tools. He calls them “band-aids.” Voice agents here, smarter scheduling software there. It’s all just lipstick on a pig, he argues.
His comparison to early EV attempts is pretty spot-on. Remember when legacy automakers just shoved batteries into existing car frames? That’s what most companies are doing with AI in car retail right now. They’re bolting it onto old systems instead of rethinking the whole thing from scratch.
“Auto retail is a perfect candidate for disrupting with AI, you know? It’s a lot of process, lot of labor, [very] rules-based,” Behl told TechCrunch. And honestly, he’s not wrong. Car buying is drowning in paperwork, verification steps, and manual processes that could absolutely be automated.
Hundreds of Invisible Steps
Ever’s co-founder and CEO Lasse-Mathias Nyberg spent a year just researching what it would take to build this thing properly. What he found was that every single car transaction triggers hundreds or thousands of tiny actions behind the scenes. Appraisals, pricing, titling, financing checks. It’s a mess.
The solution Ever landed on is what Nyberg calls an “operating system” for car retail. Think of it as an orchestration layer that handles all those workflows automatically. Instead of using a dozen different point solutions that barely talk to each other, everything runs through one unified system.
According to Nyberg, this approach has made their sales team two to three times more productive than they’d be using traditional tools. Those efficiency gains either become profit or get passed to customers through lower prices. At least that’s the theory.
The Hybrid Reality
Ever isn’t going all-in on digital, though. They’re running both an online marketplace and physical locations. Nyberg says this hybrid model matters because people still want to kick the tires, especially first-time EV buyers who are nervous about range anxiety and charging logistics.
That makes sense. Buying a car sight unseen is a big ask, even with great photos and detailed specs. There’s something about sitting in the driver’s seat that online shopping can’t replicate.
But early reviews have been all over the map. A Reddit thread from last year showed some customers loving the simplified EV buying process, while others complained about not being able to reach anyone at the company. Nyberg admits those were growing pains from operating in stealth mode, and his team is working on making the system more flexible.
The EV Enthusiasm Problem
Here’s the elephant in the room. EV interest has cooled off in the United States. Sales are still growing, but not at the breakneck pace everyone predicted a few years ago. That’s a real risk for a company betting its entire technology stack on electric vehicles.
Nyberg hasn’t ruled out expanding to gas cars eventually, but for now he wants to stay laser-focused on EVs since there’s no dedicated retailer serving that market. It’s a calculated gamble. Either EVs bounce back and Ever is perfectly positioned, or the market stays sluggish and they’re stuck in a shrinking niche.
Behl, who spent eight years on Rivian’s leadership team, admits he’s a “hopeless romantic when it comes to EVs.” He still believes the industry is moving electric because the benefits are too good to ignore. When he started looking at Ever, his first thought was apparently “I wish Rivian was doing this.”
Market Share Math
The broader bet here isn’t just about EVs. It’s about digital car retail period. Companies like Carvana and Carmax are still in the single digits of overall market share. That leaves a massive opportunity for anyone who can crack the code on actually good online car buying.
Behl thinks customers will keep gravitating toward better experiences, which means digital-first with all the friction removed. That’s probably true. The question is whether Ever’s ground-up AI approach is the right way to get there, or if they’re just reinventing wheels that didn’t need reinventing.
Building everything from scratch is expensive. It’s slow. And there’s always a risk that all that custom infrastructure becomes technical debt when the market shifts. But maybe that’s the price of admission if you want to actually fix something instead of just making it slightly less broken.
