The car market is too fragmented. A Singaporean startup wants to change that

Photo credit: SuperCar-RoadTrip.fr.

These days, technological innovation in the automotive industry is mostly associated with Tesla’s antics and developments in self-driving cars. But that’s not the only way a tech founder can shake up the car market.

Singapore-based Aureso connects car manufacturers with dealers who will sell their cars and customers who want to buy them. Aureso’s idea is a unified platform that covers the entire process of selling a car by providing useful data and a persistent online infrastructure to everyone involved.

“The manufacturer’s obligation is to deliver the car [to the dealer],” Aureso co-founder and CEO Tobias Meister tells Tech in Asia. “The dealer is the one who does the selling [to the customer]. So the manufacturer is completely disconnected from the buyer.”

Roadblocks

Tobias frames the problem like this: car dealers in any given market use their own software to manage customers, coordinate services, and provide after-sales support. It’s difficult to share the data collected with the manufacturer’s country office, and ultimately with the manufacturer itself.

Aureso wants to create a single platform that’s accessible across different devices.

Meanwhile, the buyer potentially misses out on information like the best time to service their car or which dealership is the most convenient for them – it’s nothing they can’t find out by themselves, but they don’t have quick and easy access to that information.

Aureso’s software is meant to work through all the stages of selling and buying a car. Car dealers, for example, can go after sales leads, manage orders, communicate with their customers, and provide after-sales services (like car servicing and spare parts).

Manufacturers get up-to-date data on the cars they sell, who buys them, how they are used, and how they perform. Customers can contact their dealer in real time through live chat, receive notifications on the best time and place to service their car, or book test drives for cars they intend to buy.

The startup wants to enable all this on a single platform that’s accessible across different devices. For example, dealers will access a software-as-a-service dashboard similar to Salesforce. Car buyers will have a mobile app, and so on. But the connecting tissue behind all this will be a single system that seamlessly moves data back and forth.

Clearing the road

Tobias spent more than six years in the automotive industry, including stints at German automakers Audi, BMW, and Porsche. The rest of the Aureso founding team is similarly experienced.

Co-founder and partner in the company Tim Rushforth is also CEO of Rush4th, a consulting firm that specializes in the automotive sector. It has worked with pretty much every big brand you can think of, including BMW, Porsche, Audi, Jaguar, Bentley, Land Rover, VW, Hyundai, and Range Rover.

The team has spent enough time in the trenches to know that the industry can use this type of solution. Anything else that’s currently available, from customer relationship management software to individual dealership apps for customers, is too fragmented and disparate.

Gearing up