Workers Launchpad Demo Day: Drivly

I'm Nathan Clevenger, CTO at Driveway. We're building an API platform for automotive commerce and let me tell you how we got here.

I was coming off the exit of my last software company, building a fleet of my dream cars, but I hated dealing with dealers.

I really just wanted that magical one-click buy now button that would have a car just delivered to my driveway that the dealers have with the wholesale market.

And so I really struggled with this decision. Should I become a dealer?

Ultimately, I fought the zoning and licensing regulations for almost a year and finally got my license.

Through that process, I met my co-founder, who was also coming off of an exit.

And he asked, what if there were APIs for that, like a stripe or a plaid for auto?

What if we could create APIs that represented all of the building blocks of automotive commerce for end-to-end vehicle sales to avoid a future where legacy dealerships remain in complete control of this $1.3 trillion industry and enable anyone to create a virtual dealership in the cloud to buy and sell cars with APIs?

And it turns out we weren't alone. There were lots of other companies that were just as upset with dealerships being in control, from the manufacturers to insurers to lenders who struggle with the fact that dealers get most of the margin on a financing transaction of a vehicle.

For example, a Fortune 500 lender wanted to help their customers buy cars, but dealers control the vehicle sales.

Customers don't like dealing with dealers. Why did dealers make all of the margin?

They discovered Drively APIs and created a virtual dealership in the cloud, enabling them to buy and sell cars directly without losing control of the transaction to a dealership, unlocking great margins by delivering amazing experiences right to their customers' driveway and transformed from an indirect lender to a vertically integrated auto business.

Our mental model is taking the physical, monolithic brick and mortar dealership and deconstructing it, unbundling it to all of the APIs and services that are necessary to facilitate buying and selling of vehicles end to end.

There's a lot that happens within a dealership, but we've now taken all of this into a set of simple, unified APIs.

We believe that Cloudflare is the next generation of cloud platforms like AWS or GCP, and Drively is completely built on Cloudflare from workers, queues, PubSub, and especially durable objects.

We recently closed our seed round with some of the biggest names in automotive, and we're just starting to scratch the surface of discovering what types of business models are possible, given the foundation of our APIs as building blocks for automotive commerce.