The Carpraze journey began over two decades ago. During the market crash of 1997-1998, where Robert Wissenz and Ernst Lieb, then pre-owned manager and CEO of Mercedes-Benz Canada respectively, were trying to resolve an issue with valuing used cars for the Mercedes-Benz retail stores. Due to a lack of consistent, regional-specific appraisal process, they noticed they were missing out on regional opportunities to price the vehicles effectively.

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“Back then, it was all paper or excel-based tracking to deal with the gaps we found,” says Lieb.

 

A decade later, the 2008 market crash led to similar issues; The team created a manual rating mechanism to quickly and effectively deal with the sudden overabundance of vehicles. They also looked to improve the customer experience when it came to Trade-ins by providing consistent trade-value across all their brands. All the processes designed improved the organization strategically but were manual, time-consuming, and required a decent-sized team of analysts to carry out.

 

By 2016, Lieb and Wissenz had crossed paths with Steve Devries, founder of the automotive inventory management system, DealerXchange. Devries was able to build the technical solution that automated and supported what Lieb and Wissenz had proven in their careers to be the most effective method to manage used car inventories. This reduced the burden and need for a large centralized team while speeding up the analysis process. 

 

Founded by Lieb, Wissenz, and Devries, Carpraze was officially formed in late 2018 and launched with its first clients in the Winter of 2019.