Kavak

Kavak is a Mexico City-based platform for buying, selling, and financing used cars, founded in 2016 by Carlos García Ottati, Loreanne García Ottati, and Roger Laughlin Carvallo. The company uses AI-driven pricing and vehicle-inspection tools to buy used cars from individual sellers, recondition them, and resell them with financing and warranty options, and it has expanded into Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates. Kavak became Mexico's first unicorn in late 2020 and reached an $8.7 billion valuation in September 2021 after a $700 million Series E led by SoftBank, briefly ranking as Latin America's second most valuable startup.

Facing a broader pullback in venture funding for capital-intensive consumer startups, Kavak paused operations in Colombia and Peru in January 2024, reduced its workforce to about 4,300 employees, and closed a smaller $127 million internal round in March 2025 at a sharply reduced $2.2 billion valuation, alongside $200 million credit lines each from Goldman Sachs and HSBC. In November 2025 the company launched Kavak Crédito, a fintech lending platform offering auto-purchase financing and cash-out loans against a vehicle's value, extending its business beyond used-car sales into consumer credit across Latin America.