Introducing CarGenius AI

CarGenius AI is the AI infrastructure layer for automotive retail.

The short version: AI is becoming a new front door to car shopping, and most dealerships are not ready for it. We are fixing that.

This is the story of why we are building CarGenius, what we are building, and why we think this moment matters.

The Shift has Already Begun

The way people buy cars is changing.

Consumers are starting more of their research inside AI. They ask ChatGPT which SUV fits three car seats. They ask Gemini to compare trims. They ask Perplexity what to look for in a used EV. Soon, they will ask an agent to find the exact vehicle they want, in their color, within driving distance, and help manage the back and forth.

This is an entirely new front door to the dealership.

The problem is that when AI goes looking for reliable automotive information, most dealerships are hard for it to understand.

Inventory lives in systems that were never built for machines to read. Data is messy, scattered, and locked inside platforms that do not always talk to each other. Pricing, availability, dealer policies, service capabilities, trade-in tools, and lead actions are all fragmented.

So AI does what it can when structured data is missing: it falls back on the sources that are easiest to read.

In automotive, that often means marketplaces, aggregators, and third-party content sites.

Dealers have lived through that version of disintermediation for two decades. This time, it happens faster. The consumer asks AI a question, and AI sends them somewhere other than the dealer who actually has the car, the price, the people, and the local relationship to support the purchase.

We think that is backwards.

The dealer should be in control.

Why I am building this

I have seen this movie before.

I built my first company, Autolist, during the last major platform shift in automotive: consumers moving from desktop to mobile. We built leading car shopping apps on iOS and Android, grew to millions of monthly shoppers, and sold the company to CarGurus.

Then I spent time inside the marketplace model, and I saw both the value and the limits.

Marketplaces solved real problems. They created aggregation, transparency, and consumer trust at a time when dealer websites and inventory data were not enough on their own. That mattered.

But the structure has always been difficult.

A marketplace starts out helping dealers. But the more successful it becomes with consumers, the more it has to put its own brand and experience in front of the dealer. That creates tension. It also limits the depth of the relationship. Dealers do not want to hand more data, tools, and access to an intermediary they do not fully trust, so the relationship stays shallow by design.

When I broke down what marketplaces really provide, it came down to three things: trust, transparency, and aggregation.

That is what made the next shift so interesting to me.

AI is changing the first two.

If a consumer wants to know the best third-row SUV for their family, how two trims compare, whether a used EV makes sense, or what questions to ask before buying, they increasingly do not need to start on a marketplace. They can ask AI and get a useful answer.

That does not mean AI has solved car shopping. It has not. It still needs accurate inventory, real-time pricing, dealer-specific context, and reliable ways to take action.

But that is exactly the point.

The opportunity is not to build another marketplace. I almost did that. I am glad I did not. It would have been the wrong idea at the wrong time.

The opportunity is to remove the need for another intermediary.

What excites me most is the feedback loop. In the marketplace model, what is good for the marketplace is not always good for the dealer or the consumer. The intermediary sits in the middle, and the incentives are never perfectly aligned.

CarGenius is built around a different idea.

What is good for us should be good for the dealer. What is good for the dealer should be good for the consumer. And what is good for the consumer should also be good for the AI systems trying to help them.

AI agents do not want to scrape twenty sites, guess what is current, and send a shopper through a maze. They want clean, structured, complete information and a reliable way to act on it.

The dealer's own business is where that information lives.

Our mission

Put dealers in control of the AI-powered car shopping experience by giving them the infrastructure to connect directly with consumers and their AI agents.

Our vision

A future where AI helps consumers connect directly with the best dealers, and where dealers win based on inventory, trust, service, and buying experience, not just advertising spend.

What we are building

CarGenius is the AI infrastructure layer for automotive retail.

Our core bet is simple: AI will become a primary interface for car shopping, and dealerships need a direct, structured, trusted way for AI systems to understand and interact with their business.

The foundation is an MCP Server that we deploy for each dealer.

MCP stands for Model Context Protocol. The simple version is that it gives AI systems a structured way to connect to real-world data and tools. For dealerships, that means giving AI agents a reliable way to understand inventory, pricing, vehicle details, store information, lead actions, and eventually the rest of the transaction journey.

We give every dealer their own agent-ready rails.

That means AI systems like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and whatever comes next can understand a dealer's inventory and interact with that business directly, accurately, and on the dealer's terms.

Real-time inventory. Live pricing. Vehicle details. Dealer identity. Reputation. Competitive advantages. Sales and service actions. The dealer controls what AI agents can see and do.

On top of that infrastructure, we are building products and services that create value today while the broader AI ecosystem catches up.

AI Search

AI Search brings the infrastructure to life on the dealer's own website.

It gives every visitor a best-in-class AI shopping assistant that understands natural language and can answer real shopping questions.

"Show me family SUVs under $40,000 with low mileage."

"Which of these trucks can tow a camper?"

"Do you have anything with three rows, AWD, and captain's chairs?"

"What is the difference between these two trims?"

That is the kind of shopping experience consumers increasingly expect. Search should feel like a conversation, not a filter panel.

Our pilot dealers have had a strong reaction to it because it solves an immediate problem. It gives shoppers a better way to explore inventory, ask questions, and raise their hand when they are ready.

AI Services

AI Services helps dealers understand how they show up across AI systems.

We monitor how each rooftop is represented across the major AI agents, identify gaps, and help dealers improve their AI presence over time.

Today, that means better visibility, better context, and better content for AI discovery.

Over time, it becomes part of a broader transition from SEO and SEM into AI-native discovery.

The long-term layer

Over time, the MCP layer becomes the foundation for agentic commerce across the full journey: inventory search, appointment scheduling, trade-in, financing, service, and the transaction itself.

The easiest analogy is Stripe.

Most people do not think about Stripe when they check out online. It just works. The infrastructure is underneath, doing the hard work that makes the transaction possible.

That is what we want CarGenius to become for automotive commerce inside AI.

We are not building our own consumer marketplace. We are not trying to sit between the dealer and the shopper. We are not competing with dealers for the customer relationship.

We use the best models available, swap in the next one as it arrives, and stay focused on the infrastructure that lets dealers and consumers connect directly through AI.

We start with infrastructure because infrastructure is what lasts.

Build the rails first. Then build the value on top.

Why now

Two things had to be true at the same time.

First, consumers had to start using AI for real shopping research. That is happening now.

Second, AI systems needed a better way to connect to real businesses. MCP is one of the first serious steps toward that future.

There is also a network effect that makes timing matter. It is not just that one dealer has an MCP server. As more dealers come online, we standardize how AI can search across all of them, so a query for a gray 911 knows that chalk is a match and runs across every connected store. Once that aggregation layer exists, AI starts using it because it is genuinely better than scraping third-party sites, not just different. The dealers who are in early are the ones who benefit most as that flywheel turns.

We are early, deliberately.

The dealers who get their infrastructure in place now will have a real advantage as AI becomes a larger part of consumer discovery and commerce. They will own their AI presence before the rest of the market realizes it is up for grabs.

We are not asking dealers to bet on a far-off future. AI Search and AI Services deliver value today. The infrastructure underneath is what positions them for what comes next.

AI-ready today. Built for the agentic future.

Who we are

Mason Blake and I are serial founders.

We have known each other for more than a decade, each building our own companies. After years of supporting each other through them, we are finally building one together, each leaning on what the other does best.

I am Co-Founder and CEO. I built and sold Autolist during the last major platform shift in automotive, and CarGenius is what I learned from that experience pointed at the next one. I built the marketplace model. I understand its strengths and its limits. Now I am building the alternative.

Mason is my Co-Founder and CTO. He is a two-time founder and CTO, at UpCounsel and Ratio, and a former engineering leader at LinkedIn, where he worked on high-scale marketplaces, payments, and experimentation systems.

He owns the technical architecture that makes a dealer's business legible to AI agents. That is the hard part, and it is the part most people are underestimating. He is exactly the person I want in the trenches for this.

We have also built a sharp early team around us across engineering and AI services. They are doing the hands-on work of standing up dealer infrastructure, improving the product, and making sure this performs in the real world.

Our early backers

We are fortunate to be backed by people who understand this industry and this moment.

Automotive Ventures and Exponential VC are leading our early support, alongside dealers, operators, and friends who have lived these problems firsthand.

The dealer investors matter to us as much as the funds. They are the people we are building for, and having them on the cap table keeps us honest about what actually moves the needle on a dealership lot.

Where we are

We are coming out of a pilot with a large and diverse group of dealers across several of the top dealer website platforms.

CarGenius AI Search is live on high-volume dealer sites, driving real shopper engagement and sending leads to both sales and service departments.

From here, we are widening and deepening at the same time.

Widening means support for every dealer and every major website platform, so any rooftop can get on agent-ready rails.

Deepening means more integrations into dealer systems, continued improvement of MCP for the specific demands of automotive retail, and deeper connections between leading AI agents and dealer websites.

It all serves one goal: helping dealers and consumers connect directly, on the dealer's terms.

If you are a dealer who wants to own your AI presence instead of renting it from a marketplace, or an investor who sees the same shift we do, we would love to talk.

Welcome to CarGenius.