Jaipur's first unicorn

THE PLATFORM WAS BORN IN A TIER 2 CITY IN 2008 WHEN STARTUPS WERE STILL AN URBAN PHENOMENON

- S SHANTHI

LAUNCHING A STARTUP from a Tier 2 city and scaling it up to a billion-dollar business is not easy. But brothers Amit Jain, 49, and Anurag Jain, 47, dreamt of it way back in 2008 and launched CarDekho from their hometown, Jaipur.

It all started in 2005 when Shark Tank fame Amit Jain, now CEO and co-founder of CarDekho, was transferred to Bengaluru from Austin by Trilogy, a Texas-based company where he was working as a senior associate. Anurag was also in Bengaluru around that time, working at Sabre Holdings. The brothers, both alumni of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi and Jaipur's St Xavier's School, were always inclined towards academics and tech.

During school days, the brothers had only one goal, to grab a high-paying job. IIT was a sure-shot path to achieving it. But his seven-year tenure at Trilogy exposed him to the startup ecosystem. This is when he learnt about getting traffic on the website and understood the other nuances of building product-led startups. Anurag was also inclined to launch something on his own. "IIT also gives wings to big dreams," Amit said.

But just when the brothers started conversing about it, their father passed away due to cancer in 2006. Amit and Anurag decided to quit their jobs, go back to Jaipur, live in a joint family and start something from there.