Cafler, the 'Uber of car maintenance', fetches your car for its service (interview)

On-demand car care: drivers collect your car from home, work or the gym for servicing, repair, washing, refuelling or paperwork.

That car owners will hand their car to an on-demand platform — and dealers will offer it as a value-added service — for everything from servicing to fines paperwork.

€8 million led by Spain's Seaya Ventures (September 2023).

Ricard Guillem, a 19-year-old from Barcelona who grew up in a family of auto dealers and servicers, co-founded Cafler in 2021 at 16: 'So many sectors have been disrupted by technology... but nothing like this really exists for maintaining or fixing your vehicle.' The idea: a platform where car users access anything they need at the click of a button.

Cafler won the Growth category at the Valencia Digital Summit Startup Competition in 2023 and has grown tenfold since, per Guillem. It is adding replacement vehicles, valet service and tow trucks, and training machine learning on its service data — suggesting a wash when it has rained in your area, and predicting when tyres or even engines will need replacing before users are stranded.

Car maintenance is recurring, physical and universally disliked — the exact profile of chores Uber and Deliveroo proved people will delegate.

Dealership partnerships put Cafler inside the existing car-ownership journey instead of paying to acquire drivers consumer by consumer.

The service data is the compounding asset: brake fluid levels and tyre tread feed predictive suggestions, from rain-triggered washes to failure forecasts.

A founder who literally grew up in the workshops saw the gap at 16 — domain knowledge as an unfair advantage.

Boring, physical chores are still open for disruption — and the fastest route in is through the businesses that already own the customer relationship.

As of June 2024, Cafler was focused on growth, planning expansion to new European countries 'very soon', adding replacement vehicles, valet and tow-truck services, and building predictive maintenance on its service data. Operations spanned Spain, France and the UK.