How CarDekho's Anurag Jain Created 60 Millionaires
From a Jaipur garage to $1.2B valuation, creating 60 employee millionaires through four liquidity events - all before the IPO
In 2007, two brothers sat in a garage in Jaipur and wrote something audacious on LinkedIn: they would build a billion-dollar company. Not from Bangalore. Not from Gurgaon. From Jaipur.
Their father had just passed away. They’d returned from comfortable jobs in Bangalore to be with family. The garage office had wedding tables for desks. Fourteen years later, CarDekho joined the unicorn club with a $1.2 billion valuation, becoming Rajasthan’s first unicorn.
But the more interesting story isn’t the valuation. It’s what Anurag Jain and his brother Amit did with the wealth along the way. While still private, they created over 60 millionaires among their 500+ ESOP beneficiaries. They conducted four liquidity events, letting people buy homes and clear EMIs years before any IPO. They built what Anurag calls a “house of founders,” where employees become co-founders of new business units and raise their own capital.
Check out the video of the conversation here or read on for insights.
The Profitable Foundation
The early years of GirnarSoft, CarDekho’s parent company, defy the modern startup playbook. For seven consecutive years - from 2007 to 2014 - the company was profitable every single month. No venture capital. No “growth at all costs.”
When investors started approaching them in 2010, after CarDekho gained traction, the brothers said no.
We did not know what to do with the money.
It wasn’t until a 2012 trip to the US, where they saw what large auto tech companies were building, that their vision crystallized. They took their first institutional capital in 2013: a $15 million Series A from Sequoia. By then, they’d already built something more valuable than a product - a culture and talent system that could scale.
The Jaipur decision, initially born from family necessity, became a strategic advantage.
The cost of living is quite low, relatively low. It’s not as low as a Jodhpur or Ajmer, but it is significantly lower than a Gurgaon.
But talent was scarce. So Amit and Anurag became teachers, personally conducting lectures for “hungry freshers” from tier-2 and tier-3 colleges. They eventually formalized this into a finishing school, hiring a director from NIIT to run it.
Talent is in every person in every country. We need time to bring that talent in the right place at the right time. You just need to groom them, hone them in the right skilled areas and basically they’ll do wonders for you.
Many from that first batch are still with the company 15+ years later, now in leadership positions across the group’s 6,000 employees.
The ESOP Revolution
CarDekho created its ESOP pool in 2014, with Anurag and Amit personally diluting their stakes. Today, that pool has over 500 beneficiaries, at least 60 of them millionaires. The company is still private.
The wealth creation happened through four separate liquidity events. Each time new investors came in at higher valuations, CarDekho negotiated secondary sales allowing employees to cash out portions of their vested options. The first round in 2014 priced shares at less than ₹10,000 each. Three years ago, the price had climbed to ₹1.25 lakh - a 13x jump.
Most people end up either clearing off their EMIs of their house or end up buying a house. But did people stop working once they had money? I have never seen people stop working once you generate liquidity for them. The hunger for doing better doesn’t go down.
The company’s most distinctive policy is what Anurag calls “4+4.” Work at the company for four years, and you don’t lose your vested ESOPs when you leave. Instead, you get four additional years to exercise them - enough time to potentially participate in a future liquidity event or IPO. Both active and inactive employees were included in all four buybacks.
When conducting buybacks, CarDekho caps how much senior leadership can liquidate, ensuring benefits flow to junior employees too. The ESOP program includes multiple types: loyalty ESOPs based on tenure, performance ESOPs from annual appraisals, talent ESOPs for exceptional contributions, and long-term incentive plans for leadership.
The House of Founders
The CarDekho group operates seven different businesses, but here’s what makes it unusual: many have their own co-founders, separate from Amit and Anurag. An employee who shows exceptional promise after eight to ten years can be elevated to co-founder of a new business unit, then raise external capital.
Take InsuranceDekho. It started internally, headed by Ankit Agrawal. As it scaled, it was carved out as a separate entity. Ankit raised $70 million in external funding in March 2025. The Competition Commission recently approved its merger with RenewBuy. Anurag describes it as a “unicorn in making.”
The Southeast Asia business shows a different path. Umang joined through the 2015 acquisition of Gaadi.com. A decade later, he’s co-founder of Southeast Asia operations. The group invested $30 million internally, then Umang raised $50 million externally.
We today call ourselves as a house of founders. It’s not just me and Amit who are the founders of this company. There are multiple founders. At the right material scale, the person who has been working with us as an employee for eight, 10 years in leadership is converted into a co-founder and is asked to raise capital at the subsidiary level.
Each subsidiary often has its own ESOP pool. Someone working in Jakarta gets Southeast Asia equity, not parent company equity. But business unit leaders typically get both.
Values Under Pressure
When COVID hit in 2020 and automotive sales went to zero, CarDekho’s response revealed its priorities. Employees below a certain salary bracket faced no cuts. The founders went to zero salary. Leadership took 50% or more reductions. Everyone else saw progressive cuts based on salary levels.
The company also granted zero-price shares to employees who took pay cuts, allowing them to recover losses later.
We have kind of always put our people first.
This wasn’t new. From day one, even before it was fashionable, CarDekho offered flexible work hours. When teams pulled all-nighters, the founders were there with them. The company today has open-house town halls, whistleblower policies, a recognition system, even a mood-o-meter where employees log how they’re feeling.
The Road Ahead
CarDekho has been “IPO-bound” for a while. Originally planned for 2023, then 2025, the timeline shifted due to the InsuranceDekho-RenewBuy merger. When it happens, the IPO is expected to raise around ₹4,000 crore. The company reported 50% expected growth for FY2025, building on 54% profit increase in FY2024.
Three major used-car unicorns - CARS24, CarDekho, and Spinny - are preparing for public listings that could collectively raise over $1 billion. India’s used-car market, valued at $32.14 billion in 2021, is expected to reach $74.70 billion by 2027. The only listed player, CarTrade, saw its stock surge 63% in 2025.
But Anurag doesn’t seem rushed. The company is profitable. The businesses are growing. They’ve already created substantial wealth for employees through private liquidity.
Perhaps that’s the lesson. In an ecosystem obsessed with “exit velocity,” CarDekho has played a different game - optimizing for sustainability over speed, culture over growth-at-all-costs, shared prosperity over concentrated wealth.
The wedding tables are gone from that Jaipur garage. The company now operates across India and Southeast Asia, with expansion into Saudi Arabia and the UAE in progress. The LinkedIn proclamation from 2007 has been validated.
But as Anurag would point out, the real moonshot wasn’t the valuation. It was creating 60+ millionaires along the way. It was proving that tier-2 cities can build world-class companies. It was showing that patient, profitable growth can coexist with ambition.
Dream big, not small. Even if you do half a good job, it’s kind of good enough. The entire universe in cosmos tries to align in the thoughts that you’re creating in your own head.
In a startup ecosystem often characterized by winner-take-all dynamics, CarDekho has built something different: a house where many founders can thrive, where employees become owners, where wealth creation is distributed rather than concentrated.
That might be the most valuable thing they’ve built - not the billion-dollar valuation, but the blueprint for how to share it.
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Your Host,
Satish Mugulavalli