The pain points and frustrations of vehicle ownership are many.
Beyond the high price to get the wheels themselves — new or used — there’s the time and money spent keeping the cars on the road.
That means paying for insurance — a legal requirement for car ownership — and tackling repairs and maintenance as those needs arise.
These are no easy tasks for time-constrained and budget-conscious consumers. Refinancing car loans, too, can be a benefit if one can get the best rates.
Art Agrawal, CEO of Jerry, told Karen Webster that automotive upkeep is a landscape marked by fragmentation and confusion in a trillion-dollar market, where thousands of repair shops, scores of insurance carriers and no shortage of offers confront drivers, who must pick and choose online, and perhaps hope for the best.
“If you’re making less than $100K a year,” he said, “putting $500 a year or more into insurance and repairs can become a big deal,” especially as we’re keeping cars longer and the average age of the fleet out on U.S. highways has passed the 12-year mark.
No One-Stop Shop
Those are the consumers Jerry has identified as its core demographics, he said, adding that “if you look at the state-of-the-art experience that consumers are used to — they push a button and what they want shows up. Get onto an app, or Instacart, and 30 minutes later, your grocery delivery is there.”
It’s true that consumers want choice, he said, But when car owners go online to examine their options for car insurance, in just one illustrative example, they must answer dozens of questions, wait for salespeople to call them, or go to individual carrier sites to complete the process. When repair work needs to get done, there’s no real way to know if the work being quoted is exactly what needs to be performed or if the prices are reasonable. Lack of information often makes drivers feel like they’re being taken for a ride, as Agrawal pointed out.
Historically, he said there’s been “no real eCommerce marketplace for car insurance,” a gap in the system that Jerry has sought to fill, underpinned by AI (specifically ChatGPT) and machine learning driving its app. The company is itself a licensed broker, and its PriceProtect offering compares car insurance quotes from more than 50 top insurance companies, which the company says in turn helps consumers save as much as $800 annually on insurance.
“You get the real quotes and no one’s calling you — and you don’t have to call anyone,” said Agrawal, who noted that 90% of Jerry’s consumers (now numbering 4 million) who buy policies from the marketplace do so in-app.
“Once they buy, directly, on the platform, they manage the policy in the app itself,” he said. “Jerry’s the friendly agent — and everyone should have an agent like that.”
His vision for an automotive super app — tied to all the moving parts that keep cars, well, moving — has been informed by his previous experience at the helm of YourMechanic.
YourMechanic operates as a nationwide, on-demand, online platform for car repair, where mechanics make house calls, so to speak, visiting customers at home or at the office.
YourMechanic’s success, he said, has helped informed Jerry’s path toward a soup-to-nuts approach to improving transparency (and cost) of car ownership. And that ambition is being backed by a fresh wave of investor capital in the bid to set up a de facto operating system for car ownership.
The conversation with Webster came on the heels of a just-announced $110 million in debt and equity financing led in a Series C round by existing investor Park West Asset Management.
Fresh on the heels of the funding announcement, Jerry also introduced its GarageGuard feature, which serves up cost details on maintenance and repairs and discounts through its network of participating auto. The level of detail (tracked by Jerry across thousands of shops to verify pricing and reviews), he said, eliminates the “information asymmetry” that exists in the repair industry.
Consumers and mechanics have similar information on hand — and proactive reminders about maintenance needs sourced from OEM database — and in Agarwal’s words, “speak the same language,” eliminating the leap of faith on the part of the vehicle owner that they’re getting a fair deal (Jerry will embed booking and reviews into the app in the future, Agrawal told Webster, and enable online payments too).
Separately, DriveShield leverages driving-related data to compute safety scores and power a rewards program that discounts insurance quotes and repair activities. The potential’s there, said Agrawal, to use some of the new capital to help launch subscription services that continually reward drivers for good habits on the road. Maintenance data and reminders are easily transmitted to consumers that are connected to DriveShield and GarageGuard, he said, as data flows from users’ phone sensors.
“If you’re driving well, and you keep your score high, we’ve partnered with companies like Goodyear and others that will offer discounts,” he noted. Agrawal said the data flows and rewards may be of value — down the road a bit — for mobility platforms such as Uber, where drivers must maintain their cars as part and parcel of driving shift by shift.
With the just-raised $110 million, Agrawal said that the company has a goal to become cash flow positive.
“It’s a big market,” he said of the digital transformation of car ownership, “and we have healthy economics. It all comes down to scale at this point.”
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