Aaron Tan In The Driver's Seat

The founder of Singapore’s newest unicorn, Carro, on going from serial entrepreneurship to VC and eco-system builder to steering his tech-driven online car marketplace to an impending IPO.

- Justin Harper

If you’ve not heard of Carro, you will. The fast-growing online car-buying platform has just reached unicorn status. And that means happy days for its 36-year-old founder and chief executive Aaron Tan.

For the uninitiated, a unicorn is a start-up that has a valuation of more than US$1 billion ($1.35 billion). Grab is another well-known unicorn from Southeast Asia, along with the SEA Group, which owns Shopee. Now it’s Carro’s turn to ride the e-commerce wave.

The platform reached this lofty status in June after Japan’s SoftBank Group spearheaded the latest round of funding, pumping US$360 million into the Southeast Asian start-up to push its value beyond the US$1 billion mark. But becoming a unicorn is just the start of the journey, says its charismatic founder.

“Does being valued at US$1 billion make it a successful business? No. This is just the start for us and we have a long way to go on our journey. But of course, it’s great to become a unicorn and that’s testament to all the hard work and pain the team has put in,” he says via the phone from Jakarta, where he has spent much of his time since Covid-19 restrictions curtailed international travel. Previously, he would spend half of each week in Indonesia, Carro’s biggest market, and the remainder of his time crisscrossing Southeast Asia and China.