This ex-Infosys employee quit his US job, returned and co-founded a $3 billion startup

Ruchit Agarwal was an ex-Infosys employee who subsequently worked with Merrill Lynch in Los Angeles before returning to India and launching a start-up which is now worth over $3 billion. Agarwal is one of the four co-founders of CARS24, an online used car marketplace which was launched in 2015. The other co-founders of the platform are Vikram Chopra, Mehul Agrawal, Gajendra Jangid.

In a recent podcast on Youtube, Agarwal, who is a chartered accountant by education, shared details of his long and exciting journey from an IT company to a bank in another country to returning home and finally launching a start-up. Grateful for the break he got with Infosys, Agarwal, who originally hails from Agra, said he knew he had to study hard to be able to move out of the city and explore the world.

“Fortunately for me, I got a campus placement, so I reached Infosys in Bangalore. I hadn’t seen a bigger city apart from Delhi. Bangalore was a different city back in 2004. Infosys had the campus in Electronic City. It was mind-boggling,” he said in the podcast Invetographer.  

“Infosys was very professionally run company with a billion dollar revenue. Everyone was going to the US, UK. I also wanted to go,” Agarwal said. But being a CA meant there weren’t as many opportunities to go abroad. So he decided to do MBA and got admission in Cornell University in New York in 2007.  

After completing his MBA, Agarwal got a job with Bank of America’s investment and wealth management division Merrill Lynch in 2009. “CA taught technical skills, Cornell taught management, but how do you implement them in a business or an industry? I started working on that aspect,” he said.

Agarwal shared that working with Merrill Lynch brought about financial stability and he moved past his financial obligations which allowed him to choose to return to his family in India.  “In 2014, I was able to do an internal job posting in Merrill Lynch’s Mumbai office,” he said.

During his stint with Merrill Lynch, Agarwal had got the opportunity to interact with American start-up founders in Silicon Valley. He carried the ideas from Silicon Valley to India when he returned. “I was with Merrill Lynch in India for a year. The US’ start-up bug had bitten me,” he quipped.

Agarwal met the other co-founders of CARS24 through mutual friends and they hit it off. “I knew it would be difficult to do a start-up alone, so we started brainstorming. Vikram and Mehul had this idea to tap into the car industry. They were in the furniture industry earlier (Fab Furnish). They said let’s tap into an industry that’s large enough. Auto is very big in India. Used cars was very attractive,” he added.

In the last 9 years since its launch, CARS24 has become one of the leading online used car marketplace in the country. In 2021, CARS24 expanded into other countries including Australia, Thailand, and UAE. The start-up was valued at $3.21 billion as on January 26, 2022, according to Tracxn.

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