St. Louis startup RollSale is looking to shake up the market of used car sales. Instead of customers driving their vehicle around town to local dealerships and wrangling potential offers together themselves, RollSale allows sellers to anonymously list the vehicle online and quickly see what variety of local dealers will be willing to pay for their used ride. In addition to helping individual sellers, the startup provides an online space for participating dealerships to actively seek out a steady stream of used automobiles.
RollSale was founded by Mike Nichols and Brian Moore in the Spring of this year, when the pair soft-launched to auto dealers in the St. Louis area. Recently the founders expanded the consumer half of the service to Boulder, Colorado with the help of funding from TechStars. Mike Nichols, the president of RollSale, has worked in the auto industry since the mid ’90s and designed online products for AutoTrader and eBay Motors. CEO Brian Moore was previously consultant for the Fortune 100, and aided a post-bankrupt GM with its internal technology and helping it sustain profitability.
The founders said their main direction with RollSale is to make the car business better for both sellers and used car dealers by removing the middle man. “I conceived of RollSale as a way to apply my tech and startup experience to a problem that always bothered me from my dealership days: a wasteful and inefficient used car supply chain,” Nichols said.
For consumers, the process of gathering offers from local dealers is as easy as posting a picture and basic information about their used vehicle. RollSale doesn’t charge consumers anything for their business, and only requires participating dealers to pay a nominal monthly fee. RollSale is perhaps even more helpful to auto dealers because it enables them to take on a much more active roll when it comes to acquiring used car inventory.
According to Nichols, the startup has nearly 50 dealers onboard and despite limited marketing has already seen more than 150 customer listings in the past few weeks.
Between funds from TechStars and a private angel investor, RollSale has raised over $250,000. Nichols said the startup is currently working on raising a seed round to “scale into multiple markets simultaneously.”