My co-founders, Lina Zhang and Musawir Shah, and I worked together at my previous startup, YourMechanic, a company that provides mobile automotive repair and maintenance services to vehicle owners at their location. Through that experience and our own personal, frustrating experiences with all car ownership hassles, we knew this was a category ripe for disruption. From determining what car to buy, financing a vehicle, finding insurance, licensing, titles, warranties, repairs, parking, and maintenance, we saw very clearly that services for car owners were lagging behind the ease and convenience offered in other industries. We wanted to remove the friction and make the transactions seamless and less expensive. The three of us set out to launch a product that would solve these hassles for car owners. We started with a car insurance compare-and-buy service that quickly gained traction Since then we have helped more than 3 million customers shop for car insurance. We’ve also expanded our vision from a car insurance shopping site to a car ownership super app. That is because car insurance is just one of the expensive hassles car owners experience. Today, in addition to our car insurance marketplace, our app helps customers with auto refinancing, safe driving and more.
Owning a car is the second largest American household expense. And, so many components of car ownership are complicated and outdated, like buying insurance and refinancing an auto loan. It is a big problem because owning a car should make your life easier but in many ways it makes it more complicated. Through my own experience, I learned that owning a car is not the “American dream” I hoped it would be, but rather, it’s expensive, frustrating and time consuming.We decided to build a product that takes the frustration out of car ownership – starting with shopping for and buying insurance – and makes it easy to save. Through our AI-backed insurance marketplace, car owners can automatically shop from more than 55 top U.S. car insurance companies in 45 seconds and complete the transaction in minutes. This approach to revamping the insurance shopping experience worked and it saves Jerry customers, on average, more than $800 per year.We applied this same automated technology to our auto refinancing marketplace, which takes a typical end-to-end process of 19 days down to less than 48 hours. And our goal is to shrink that even further. Through insurance and refinancing we’ve started solving the small problems that contribute to the massive frustration that is car ownership in the U.S.
The long term vision is to create a car ownership super app that supports drivers with all their expensive car hassles, saving them both time and money. Today, we do that through our car insurance and auto refinancing marketplaces, and we offer customers rewards for safe driving with our Drive Well, Earn Perks program. But these aren’t the only expenses drivers incur, which means there are many other opportunities for Jerry to support our customers, with things like maintenance, parking, and more.We want to solve all of those issues. When drivers no longer have to worry about car ownership hassles because they know Jerry is doing the work to save them time and money, we will have achieved our goal.