CarInfo
India's most downloaded automobile app.
I co-founded CarInfo with Sahil Ajmani in June 2016, as a side project while we were both working at ixigo. It did one thing: type in a number plate and see the vehicle's details.
The growth was organic. Someone looked up a car, found it useful, and told someone else. We were profitable from the fourth month, never raised outside money, and CarInfo has been in the Play Store's top 100 apps in India for a decade.
Over six and a half years the lookup grew into an app for owning a vehicle in India: RC details and ownership history, insurance, challans and PUC status, resale values, used-car loans, renewal reminders, and car comparisons and reviews. Partnerships with CarDekho, Spinny, Acko, and Probus brought in distribution and revenue.
Engineering for scale
Our traffic never stopped growing, and a small team had to keep the engineering ahead of it. CarInfo reached 1 million daily active users, around 10 million a month, and passed 80 million downloads across Android and iOS.
Most of the hard work was in the data. The sources were fragmented, and they went down or changed without warning. I built the aggregation engine that turned them into a sub-second lookup, cached records so users still got answers during outages, and monitored every source so a broken one got caught fast.
After I left
After six years I wanted to build something new, and I exited in December 2022. CarInfo kept growing. When Cars24 acquired it in January 2026 in a ₹118 crore deal, more than 12 million people were using it every month.
2016 CarInfo → 2022 Hawk MarTech → 2024 Lunarbounds → 2026 Open Theory Labs