How Carvago Launched Its Business Idea in 3 Months

Learn how the online marketplace for used cars processes more than 5.5 million ads daily with Keboola

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Business Category:

Retail

Business Challenge:

Data Silos

Company Size:

SME

Region:

Europe

>5,5

million Car Ads Daily

15,000

Customers

Countries

About Carvago

Tomas Trnka, Chief Data Officer at EAG group (Carvago's parent company), shares how Carvago turned a simple idea into a company with $7M annual revenue in just three months.

Every day, Carvago analyzes 5.5 million car ads in destinations all over Europe, offering a smooth car shopping experience across borders for everyone.

Carvago, a digital marketplace for buying and selling used cars, offers the best car deals to over 15,000 B2C and B2B customers without owning a single vehicle. The secret? Data.

The Challenge:

Building a Scalable Data Infrastructureto Drive Growth

When they came up with their business idea, Carvago knew they'd face a lot of challenges:

Different languages

Ads appear in various languages, including French, German, and Romanian, complicating standardization due to local idioms and dialects.

Market-specific rules

Besides differing laws and tax systems, as well as the logistics of importing cars, each market has unique regulations. For instance, the concept of mileage differs in Sweden, where a "mile" refers to 10 km, not the usual 1.6 km.

Non-uniform ad formats

Different layouts, details, and images used across sellers and platforms make it hard to automate the content extraction and upload.

Price validation complexity

To identify real bargains, Carvago needed to meticulously sift through listings to separate genuine deals from scams.

Running Carvago without a data team is impossible. Carvago sells data as its product and is among the top 3 AWS clients in the Czech Republic. We process 5.5 million ads and 600,000 new photos daily. This includes different types of data processing from image recognition to natural language processing and other machine learning models to classify, filter, and enrich the ads.

Tomas Trnka

Chief Data Officer

The Solution:

An Automated Data Management Platform That Can Keep Up With Business Needs

Additionally, Tomas revealed that manually processing a car ad takes about an hour. To handle millions of car ads at this volume, Carvago would require a staggering 500,000 employees.

Carvago realized the classic approach would delay their launch by years.

Keboola was the weapon of choice from the very beginning. One day we need 1 hour of computing, then the next 1,000 hours. We needed a solution that scales up and down. With Keboola, we can focus on business growth without DevOps concerns the ads.

We evaluated other options, yet none matched Keboola's comprehensive capabilities. Keboola is an all-in-one platform. It gives you out-of-the-box monitoring, orchestrations, multiple backends, storage, and data governance.

Tomas Trnka

Chief Data Officer

The Data Challenges

Here are some examples of how Carvago leverages Keboola:

Use Case #1

Rapid Business Idea Validation

When Carvago was building its data product, Keboola took care of the DevOps, data warehouse, scaling resources, and even setting up all of the administrative backend. This allowed the team to focus on building the Carvago platform, rather than worrying about the DataOps.

Keboola's agility enabled us to transform a business idea into a production-ready MVP within three months, a process that might have taken years with a traditional data management approach.

Tomas Trnka

Chief Data Officer

Use Case #2

Automated Operations Across Departments

By automating machine-learning tasks, Keboola enables Carvago to process 5.5 million ads every day. The scale of Carvago's operations reveals the critical role of automation. However, automation extends far beyond ad processing.

Tomas and his team of nine data experts built a system to automate numerous business operations, including standardizing bank receipts for control, scoring prospects in Salesforce, and automating procurements for logistics.

5.5 M

ads every day

A person can manually process 1 car ad per hour to make it ready for our website. So 8 ads per day. We’re processing 5.5M ads daily at Carvago. Without Keboola, we would need 560,000 people to do the same job.

Tomas Trnka, Chief Data Officer

Use Case #3

New Fully-Governed Data Use Cases

Keboola centralizes all data assets and jobs in a single platform, under a unified data governance framework. This enables Tomas and his team to quickly reuse previous work for launching new data use cases.

This efficiency not only speeds up development, but also ensures consistency and quality across projects.

Here’s an example of the platform's impact:

For a new marketing project, I can immediately reuse our current work—accessing relevant data sets and transformations, and identifying the last contributor with ease.

Tomas Trnka, Chief Data Officer

Use Case #4

New Data Integrations With A Couple Of Clicks

Keboola simplifies data integration with features like 700+ pre-built connectors and a drag-and-drop visual flow builder. This ensures quick data synchronization across a diverse range of sources.

Tomas shares the effect of Keboola on their workflows:

With Keboola, we can get data from various places in minutes, transform it, and send it elsewhere. You can automate the whole process in an instant.

Tomas Trnka, Chief Data Officer

Keboola’s rapid integration capabilities underscore its role as an indispensable asset for dynamic data management.

Use Case #5

Safe Collaboration With External Partners

Tomas and his team cooperate with the Czech Technical University on electrical car grant projects.

In one key project, they're working with students to harness the power of machine learning and refine a price predictor for cars, drawing on vast historical ad data to do this - a step towards more accurate market insights.

Traditional data stacks often falter at sharing extensive historical data; they can be hampered by volume constraints and elevated risks of security breaches, especially with external partner access.

Using Keboola, Tomas and his team effortlessly launched a new project and securely shared the extensive historical data with university students, this time without the usual concerns over governance and security breaches.

The Impact

A Scalable Data Stack That Ensures Quality and Faster Time-To-Market

Since implementing Keboola, Carvago has seen a variety of strong results:

5.5 million car ads daily

Leveraged technology to analyze 5.5 million car ads daily — a task that would otherwise demand the efforts of 500,000 people.

Ready in just 3 months

Transformed their vision into a market-ready product in just 3 months — achieving what typically takes a year using traditional methods.

Automating business

Increased efficiency by automating business operations across every department, from finance to logistics.

Facilitating collaboration

Seamless and secure collaboration with external partners.

Thanks to Keboola’s versatility

... we were able to develop our entire Data Product within its ecosystem. This approach eliminated the need for us to design an appropriate stack from various tools, allowing us to concentrate on enhancing the quality of our output and reducing time to market.

Tomas Trnka

Chief Data Officer

Thanks to Keboola

... we dared to try and launch Carvago as a business, which was a crazy idea at the time.

Tomas Trnka

Chief Data Officer

How Carvago Launched Its Business Idea in 3 Months

About Carvago

Building a Scalable Data Infrastructureto Drive Growth

Different languages

Market-specific rules

Non-uniform ad formats

Price validation complexity

An Automated Data Management Platform That Can Keep Up With Business Needs

Here are some examples of how Carvago leverages Keboola:

Rapid Business Idea Validation

Automated Operations Across Departments

New Fully-Governed Data Use Cases

New Data Integrations With A Couple Of Clicks

Safe Collaboration With External Partners

A Scalable Data Stack That Ensures Quality and Faster Time-To-Market

5.5 million car ads daily

Ready in just 3 months

Automating business

Facilitating collaboration

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