Beepi

» see beepi.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

beepi's peak years overlap with my own car-buying age, but the model was a san francisco peninsula experiment that did not travel. in 2014 i was a software engineer in ankara on a ttnet adsl line. used cars in turkey moved through sahibinden.com listings and through dealer lots, not through a startup with an inspection van and a return window.

ale resnik and owen savir founded beepi in 2013 after resnik bought a used car that caught fire two days later. honestly. the proposition was a 240-point inspection plus a ten day return window, at a peer-to-peer markup the listing seller could not match. early traction was real. by october 2014 the company had raised sixty million on a two hundred million valuation, and by 2015 the total raise crossed a hundred and fifty million dollars at a five hundred and sixty million dollar post-money.

in those days. in december 2016 beepi stopped operating outside california and announced a merger with the stealth-mode rival fair.com run by former true car ceo scott painter. the merger fell apart at the closing stage. on 17 february 2017 axios reported the company was selling parts of itself to satisfy creditors and beepi was effectively done. the formal assignment for the benefit of creditors followed within weeks.

i was not paying attention to the day-to-day. anyway, the company burned around seven million dollars a month at peak on inspection vans and a free-for-buyers no-fee-for-sellers model that was too generous in both directions (or roughly). in turkey i watched the saga from a forum thread that translated techcrunch posts. the lesson came across as a category mismatch, not a regional one.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

in the bay area in 2015 beepi was on freeway billboards and bart station ads, and the company let prospective buyers borrow a car for twenty-four hours before committing. the inspection report was the thing people pointed at. carmax did something similar at the dealer scale, beepi tried to do it without the dealer.

the pitch to sellers was a higher dollar than dealer trade-in without the craigslist work. the pitch to buyers was a lower dollar than carmax with a real return window. the math was supposed to work because the markup that normally went to two dealer touches went to one platform touch instead.

~ the slide ~

inspections and holding lots cost real money, and the markup that was supposed to fund both arrived too thin to do either. fundraising in late 2015 was already harder than the prior year. 2016 brought rounds that closed at flat valuations and then stopped closing. attempting a leasing pivot through fair.com made the pitch fundable for another quarter. then fair.com pulled the merger and beepi had no plan b.

~ how it actually ended ~

the shutdown was processed through an assignment for the benefit of creditors. cars in inventory went back to consignors or to auction. the engineering team scattered, some to carvana and some to fair.com which continued in stealth for another three years. fair.com itself folded its consumer business in october 2020. the peer-to-peer-used-car category as a venture-funded play was effectively over by then. carvana took the public-market end while vroom and shift fought over the middle. the peer-to-peer leg, the one beepi was built on, did not come back.

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