2019 feels like a long time ago to Tom Krüger. “Entrepreneur years are like dog years,” he laughs.
That’s how it feels when he reflects back on Europe's B2B used car market back then. The market was worth hundreds of billions, and almost none of it moved digitally.
Dealers were stuck trading locally, with a handful of buyers, leaving enormous value on the table. The same car could fetch thousands of euros more or less depending on which country it happened to sit in. The market was fragmented, opaque, and running on handshakes. Nobody had built the infrastructure to connect it at scale, bring real pricing transparency, and optimize every transaction.
Tom and his co-founders saw a gap. A technology the market resisted, but needed: an entirely new AI-powered operating system for used car trading across Europe.
Like assembling each component in a car engine, they built this from the ground up. Building blocks for an infrastructure that one day, Tom believes, the whole B2B used car industry will operate on.
The right people, at the right time
The idea for CarOnSale actually traces back to Oguz Özgüler, Tom’s co-founder.
He had spent years inside the industry. When he opened his own dealership in 2011, he experienced firsthand how inefficiently the industry operated, and started looking for ways to change that. He traded on early online platforms, then joined a large dealership group to push their digital operations forward. But, once it became clear they had no real interest in actually changing the industry, he left.
When his path crossed with Tom's and Fabi's, Oguz knew exactly what he wanted to do - and this time, he had the right people to do it with.
What Oguz brought to the table was conviction backed by lived experience: a vast European market still largely offline, a business model opportunity that US players like Shopify had started proving in different retail categories as operating systems, and an asset-light approach to making it work without carrying inventory risk.
Tom had the financial background, the investor network, and the ability to see the architecture of what this could become. Fabi, who Tom had first met briefly in 2012 and reconnected with in San Francisco in 2018, had spent years at a Mercedes-Benz research center in Silicon Valley and would become the technical backbone. Max joined shortly thereafter to bring in the expertise in how to build and scale products, operations and processes to really institutionalize the whole endeavor. However it was not only about the four in the beginning, but a wider range of people who really helped to get this started, another early co-founder who helped to orchestrate a lot of early success and several employees who are still at the heart of this company.
Not digital for digital’s sake
The founding team’s first move was not to build. It was to listen. In one of their earliest meetings, Oguz took Tom and Fabi to the ‘Autohandlermeile’ to talk to local dealers. They were met with immediate skepticism. Their appearance, Tom jokes, made some dealers assume the tax authority had arrived.
But Oguz’s reputation opened doors. What they heard shaped their entire approach. Dealers were not waiting for someone to digitize them for the sake of it. They needed better returns, more buyers and real transparency on pricing. The technology had to earn its place.
“People don’t go digital because they want to go digital, but because they get a benefit out of it. The value we always had to prove was: can you make better returns, better profits per car, with more convenience and transparency?” Tom says.
They started with the most fundamental transaction: dealer-to-dealer trade. Fabi built the first version of the product from the Mercedes-Benz office in Silicon Valley. The code he wrote then still forms the core of CarOnSale’s infrastructure today.
In October 2018, they ran their first live auction. One of Germany’s largest dealership groups, which they had convinced to go exclusively through CarOnSale, listed a car with a minimum ask of €1500. It sold for €3000. All the founders gathered for the pickup. The proof of concept was no longer theoretical.
Compounding improvements every day
The road from there was not smooth, but it rarely is.
One of their earliest major customers wanted to take a large stake in the company. The founders believed in what CarOnSale could become and disagreed. The customer stepped back from the relationship, and with them went a significant share of revenue. It was the kind of moment that defines a founding team. Rather than pulling back, they used it to prove the model held without them.
Investors, watching closely, maintained their confidence. In August 2019, CarOnSale closed its Seed round led by Creandum. Max Schilling, who had spent five years at Bain specializing in private equity and automotive strategy, joined as the fourth co-founder and COO shortly after. The team also made the strategic decision to move their main office to Berlin, shifting their ambition from regional to national (and even international).
Then came COVID. Transactions fell from several hundred cars per month to almost nothing in early 2020. Then the chip crisis of 2021 eliminated supply. Then economic headwinds in 2022 forced difficult decisions, including layoffs.
Each crisis taught the same lesson in a different form. “Founders will feel very emotional about anything that happens to the business, be that good or bad. You need to channel those emotions the right way.” Tom remembers.
The decisions that mattered - making quick calls, being honest with the team, cutting once rather than incrementally - were the ones that kept the business alive.
What CarOnSale built through those years was not just resilience. It was operational discipline. A data-driven approach to every transaction. Unit economics that held under pressure. And a product that kept expanding: not because the founders chased growth, but because each layer of the product made the next layer more valuable.
“It’s really not the one big thing you do which changes everything, but a lot of tiny changes compound massively. Every day our teams wake up and do it 0.3% better here, 0.2% better there. Over years that compounds massively.”
The present & the future
CarOnSale has transformed from a marketplace into an AI-driven operating system for B2B automotive trade across Europe. It covers the full used vehicle journey end-to-end: from vehicle intake and inspection, through pricing and remarketing, to payment, financing, and fulfillment. The distinction matters.
A marketplace connects buyers and sellers. What CarOnSale has built goes further. It controls the workflow, the data, and the transaction intelligence on both sides. Sellers get AI-powered pricing, automated inspection reports, and access to buyers across 26 countries instead of the few within driving distance. Buyers get verified vehicle data, transparent condition reports, and integrated financing. Over 130 APIs connect the system to third-party dealer software. More than 20 million vehicle data points sharpen every pricing decision. Every new transaction makes the intelligence stronger, the liquidity deeper, and the advantage harder to replicate.
“There is never one silver bullet. You can release one element and create an amazing competitive advantage. But for us, it’s about building the whole ecosystem, bringing it all together. It can feel slow when you’re in the moment, but then you look back and see how massive the difference is over time.”
In 2024, CarOnSale acquired AlphaOnline, adding dealer management software to the stack and deepening its integration into how dealerships run their day-to-day operations. That same year, they launched a partnership with Mercedes-Benz for B2B digital vehicle auctions, processing leasing returns across multiple European markets. The OEM channel is no longer a future ambition. It is already running.
In 2025, CarOnSale closed its €70 million Series C led by Northzone. Confirmation that the strategy had been right all along.
Today, CarOnSale is the market leader in central Europe in dealer-to-dealer used car trade. More than 40,000 registered dealers across 26 countries. Buyers active in over 20 EU markets. A team of more than 400 people, with founders and early hires who have grown into senior leaders still running core parts of the business.
This scale of ambition has been the biggest change that Tom’s seen over the last eight years. “Car dealerships used to be a local game, but increasingly dealers are waking up to the idea that they can play on a European level.”
From builder to system creator
Tom's role and those of the early team have changed considerably since the days of going door-to-door on the ‘Autohandlermeile’. “You need to grow from builder to system creator,” Tom says.
That shift is not about stepping back. It is about recognizing which decisions only you can make, and building the team, the culture, and the processes to carry everything else. And increasingly, it is about how you work. At CarOnSale, AI is no longer the domain of the engineering team. Tom himself uses it daily. The expectation is the same from intern to C-suite: “The people who embrace it are the ones who move fastest and think clearest.”
The leadership team Tom has assembled combines automotive credibility, operational depth, and technical ambition: Oguz leading customer insights with deep industry knowledge, Fabi driving technology, Max running the whole operations, demand side and product with the precision of someone who has spent years making complex systems work. What unifies them? “A deep culture of being close to the customer.”
The industry Tom entered in 2018 was fragmented, local, and resistant to change. The one CarOnSale is building toward operates on a different logic entirely: continental scale, real-time intelligence, and compounding advantage with every transaction. The building blocks are in place, and the work in the engine room continues.
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