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The story
Founded by Ernest Garcia III.1
Carvana was founded by Ernest Garcia III, Ryan Keeton and Ben Huston in 2012. The company's initial funding round came from the used car retailer and finance company DriveTime. A year later Carvana opened its first iteration of a car vending machine. In 2015, a fully automated, commemorative coin-operated version of the signature car vending machine opened in Nashville, Tennessee. Carvana currently operates over 30 vehicle vending machines in the US.
In April 2017, the company went public and began trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol CVNA. Also in the same year Carvana acquired rival automotive startup Calypso and in this same year Carvana's co-founders were included in Fortune’s 40 Under 40 list in 2017. The following year Carvana spent $22 million to acquire Mark Cuban-backed Car360 for its smartphone technology for taking vehicle photos with 3D computer vision, machine learning, and augmented reality. In 2022, Carvana acquired ADESA, the nation’s second-largest wholesale auto auction chain, for $2.2 billion to increase its real estate footprint.
Carvana began offering touchless delivery and pick-up in March 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic. In Q2 for that year, the company reported a 25% increase in vehicle sales, as a result of physical dealership sellers being closed as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic. Carvana had a gross revenue of $1.12 billion, up 13% for April–June 2020. Throughout that year Carvana sold 244,111 vehicles and posted annual revenue of $5.587 billion, making it the second largest online used-car retailer in the U.S. As of November 2023, Carvana's as-soon-as-next-day delivery was available in 300+ markets nationwide. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Carvana's market value increased when consumers turned to vehicle online marketplaces.
In August 2023, Carvana introduced same-day delivery for customers purchasing or selling a vehicle, the service is currently available in Alabama, Arizona, Indiana, North Carolina, Georgia, Dallas-Fort Worth, and Central Florida.
In May 2022, The Wall Street Journal reported that Carvana had to lay off 12% of its staff (2,500 employees) after falling short of growth expectations. Carvana stock was 90% off its 52-week stock price as interest in the company collapsed. On November 4, 2022, Carvana's stock price dropped around 40% following its poor third-quarter financial results. The total number of used vehicles sold declined by 8% to 102,570. Analysts blamed rising borrowing costs and elevated used-car prices.
In February 2024, CNBC reported Carvana had spent the last 18 months restructuring its operations and debt given concerns about potential bankruptcy. As part of the shift from growth to cost cutting, the company lowered its headcount by more than 4,000 people, removed $1.1 billion of annualized expenses out of operations; released a new proprietary software called Carli that would allow for end-to-end processing of vehicle reconditioning and other tasks that were previously manual; built specific tools for inbound and outbound logistics activities like mapping, route optimization, and driver schedule management; and introducing new tools that employed generative AI for some tasks.
The company moved into the new car market in 2025.
From Wikipedia’s article on Carvana, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.8