For investors · 2026
Plaid for cars.
Totaled is the verified vehicle data layer for a $3.6 trillion cluster of US auto industries, repair, used-car retail, insurance, warranty, lending, OEM, and aftermarket. Built agent-native. Open API on day one. The first net-new vertical data infrastructure platform for cars built for the AI era.
Combined US TAM
$3.6T
Annual transaction volume across the seven industries Totaled touches.
Target ARR · Y5
$250M
45% enterprise data licensing · 22% shop SaaS · the rest a mix.
Target ARR · Y8
$1.2B
Mix tilts toward enterprise data licensing as Plaid did against deposits.
Comparable
$11B
CCC Intelligent Solutions (closed-garden, pre-AI-agent). We're the open-API replacement.
Thesis
Why this exists, and why now.
Vehicle truth is the missing primitive in a $3.6T market cluster. Carfax owns title and accident data. Nobody owns truth about what was actually fixed. That's the wedge. Once verified repair data exists at scale, it becomes a load-bearing input for insurance underwriting, warranty pricing, lender risk, dealer trust, and AI-mediated shopping, six adjacent industries that all currently price on aggregate model-year data because nothing better exists.
Every existing auto data platform, Cars.com, AutoTrader, Carvana, Carfax, is a closed garden because their business models depend on ad-impression revenue. They cannot open their data without breaking themselves. Totaled is transaction- and licensing-revenue, perfectly compatible with open-API + agent-native distribution. Structural moat, not strategic preference.
Combined TAM
The $3.6T attack surface.
| Industry | US value | Totaled mechanism | Phase |
|---|---|---|---|
| Auto repair & maintenance | $160B | Shop SaaS · Walk-around · embedded financing | Launch |
| Used-car retail | $840B | Buyer reports · verified-listing fees · CPO certification | Scale |
| Auto insurance premiums | $316B | Underwriting enrichment · per-policy data licensing | Phase 3 |
| Vehicle service contracts / warranty | $50B | Per-quote data fee · risk-tier pricing | Phase 3 |
| Auto financing originations | $1.7T (outstanding) | Per-loan data fee · vehicle-side credit signal | Phase 3 |
| Aftermarket parts retail | $370B | Verified Installer program · brand data licensing | Phase 4 |
| Vehicle data / telematics | $3.5B → $11B by 2030 | Direct play, this is our category | Direct |
Sources: IBISWorld 2024; Cox Automotive 2024; NAIC 2024; Warranty Week 2024; Federal Reserve G.19 Q1 2025; Auto Care Association 2024; Markets&Markets 2024.
Comparables
What this is worth, fully built.
| Company | Position | Value |
|---|---|---|
| CCC Intelligent Solutions (CCCS) | Closed-garden insurance + repair data, public | ~$11B market cap |
| Cox Automotive | Autotrader / Manheim / KBB / vAuto bundle | ~$10B+ revenue |
| Solera (Vista Equity) | Closed-garden auto data + claims | ~$6.5B last valuation |
| S&P Global Mobility (Carfax) | Title + accident data | ~$1.5–2B revenue line |
| Mitchell International | Auto + workers-comp claims | ~$3–4B |
| Plaid (private) | Open data layer for finance | ~$13B last round |
All competitors are closed gardens built before 2010. Totaled is the open-API, agent-native equivalent, built net-new for the AI era.
Demand · researched
Every consumer type already wants this.
| Audience | Stat | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Used-car buyers | 88% distrust reported condition | Cox Automotive 2024 Used Car Buyer Journey |
| Used-car buyers | 62% would pay extra for verified history | Cox Automotive 2024 |
| Used-car buyers | 47% walk away because they can’t verify what was done | CarGurus 2024 Buyer Confidence Index |
| Owners | Organized records lift sale price 8–12% | Hagerty 2024 Vehicle Maintenance Study |
| Owners | Most can’t recall last 3 services | CarMD 2024 |
| Shop owners | 71% cite fake reviews as top digital pain | Auto Care Association 2024 |
| Shop owners | 89% would switch to verified-only review platform | Auto Care Association 2024 |
| Online shoppers | 34% used AI agent for purchase research in 2024 (5% in 2022) | a16z 2024 AI Shopping Report |
The demand is latent and well-documented across every audience type. The bottleneck has been infrastructure, not desire.
GTM
How we get every American on this.
- : 25 founding shops, validated cold-call motion (founder runs Redline Revenue, established channel). Mobile mechanics seeded.
- Owner viral: email OAuth back-fill, Gmail/Outlook receipts parsed by Claude → instant 5–10 year service history, no manual upload.
- Plaid card enrichment: frequency-verified tier auto-populates from any cardholder's transaction history.
- Browser extension + agent integration: instant Totaled Report on every Facebook Marketplace / Craigslist / private-party listing in America.
- MCP + AEO: first verified-data tool in every major agent registry; AEO surfaces become the canonical citation for vehicle truth across Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, ChatGPT.
- OEM partnerships: co-branded ownership tooling for Ford SYNC / GM OnStar / Stellantis Mopar Connect in exchange for telemetry feed. ~120M connected vehicles by 2027.
- Enterprise sales: insurance + warranty + lender pipelines opened Phase 3 (12–24 mo cycle); Phase 4–5 conversion is the ARR step-function.
Moat
Why we win, and stay won.
- Structural agent-native moat. Cars.com / AutoTrader / Carvana literally cannot follow without breaking their ad-revenue model.
- Compounding data graph. Each new verified entry, each owner claim, each insurance integration multiplies value of every prior datapoint.
- Seven independent ingestion paths. Shops, owners, OEM telemetry, NHTSA, insurance/warranty, parts retailers, Plaid card data, no single dependency.
- Public dashboard ethos. Live metrics on every surface. Trust earned, not asserted.
- Brand premium. Editorial-magazine + Hoonigan / BaT / Filson reference stack. Built by someone who actually knows cars. Price-insensitive enthusiast LTV.
Revenue architecture
Five pricing motions, tuned to willingness-to-pay.
| Audience | Mechanism | Price | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Owners | Free forever | $0 | Drives the demand side. Acquisition paid back via reports buyers buy on their cars at sale time. |
| Buyers | One-off + subscription | $29 / report · $14.99/mo unlimited | Carfax sells at $44.99/$99.99 with worse data. Undercut + win on substance. |
| Shops | Free / $99 / $299 / $499 | tiered SaaS | Charge for growth tools, not data. Tier 1 verification gated to paid. |
| Dealers | $999/mo + per-VIN + rev share | enterprise SaaS | Trust badge lifts conversion 4–7%. Pays back the platform 50× per rooftop. |
| Insurance / Warranty / Lender / OEM | Per-call API + ACV minimums | $0.10–1.00 · $250K–5M | Vehicle-specific data is 10–100× more predictive than aggregate model-year data. |
| Developers / Agents | Free · $999 · custom | tiered API | Free seeds adoption. Pro captures high-volume builders. Enterprise captures OEM-internal AI. |
Reality check
What could break, and what stops it.
| Risk | Mitigation |
|---|---|
| Shop adoption is slow | Email + Plaid + parts-retailer back-fill covers 70%+ historical data without shop cooperation. Shops are revenue, not survival. |
| Carfax launches "Carfax Repair" | They’ve threatened this for 10 years; their dealer-revenue model prevents shipping. We ship before they unblock themselves. |
| Insurance enterprise sale takes 18+ mo | Pipeline opens launch H2, not later phases. Small-revenue lines (shops, reports) cover burn through the long cycle. |
| Privacy regulation | VIN is not personal data under GDPR/CCPA. Owner-side identity layer ships GDPR-compliant from week 1. |
| Carfax incumbent buys a competitor | They’ve tried, Cox/Solera/CCC also tried. None can open data without breaking their existing licensing relationships. Window is 24–36 mo. |
| Founder bandwidth | Senior eng hire by month 4. Launch market GM by month 3. Founder stays on brand + sales motion + product vision. |
The ask
Pre-seed, then Series A on data licensing pipeline.
Bootstrapped through the first 50 founding shops + first 1,000 buyer reports. Pre-seed ~$2–3M to fund: senior engineer + Launch market GM + enterprise sales lead + 18 months of runway. Series A in month 12–15 once the data licensing pipeline has 5+ LOIs from insurance/warranty/lender targets.
Build artifacts already shipped (running locally today): full marketing site, interactive 5-view product demo, Next.js + Drizzle + SQLite product app, public agent-native API, VIN photo OCR, NHTSA integration, Totaled Value valuation engine.
Next step
Talk.
Strategic plan + concept brief + live build all in this repo. Founder runs Redline Revenue + first three Totaled customers (mobile mechanics) already validated. Launch Q3.
Reach out →