Delaware AI startup WhipFlip keeps streamlining the used vehicle industry

The company — a 2022 RealLIST Startups honoree in Delaware and a recent finalist for the PACT Enterprise Awards Startup of the Year — doesn’t have tech that answers text questions or writes haikus with too many syllables or creates uncanny artwork.

Instead: “We’re an AI technology company that happens to buy cars,” Clappe said to Technical.ly.

Using WhipFlip’s AI app, customers submit photos of the vehicle they’re selling along with some information via text. Its proprietary AI tool can determine the car’s condition history and current value, and shows an offer amount in seconds. Inspired by the DoorDash model, a concierge service comes to them to pick up the car to be delivered to a dealer for resale.

Roger Clappe. (Courtesy photo)

Over the last year and a half since WhipFlip was named to Technical.ly’s RealLIST, it’s also been developing a service-level app for dealers to buy and sell cars, or use for appraisal. That’s slated to launch next year.

“We’ve kind of created this ecosystem,” Clappe said. “We make the car selling process super easy for consumers, and that’s absolutely the core of what we do, but we also take unwanted inventory from the dealers and we also replenish them with needed inventory, because there still is somewhat of a shortage, especially in quality used cars” following supply chain disruptions that started in 2020.

Right now, WhipFlip covers 10 states as far south as South Carolina, as far west as Indianapolis and as far north as Northern New Jersey. Its headquarters are located in The Mill’s downtown Wilmington location, where the team moved into the large space formerly leased by DuPont Digital after outgrowing their small Mill-based offices.

“Our team went from four people to a little bit above 30,” Clappe said. “So we’re starting to grow up as a company, with 89% revenue growth and 60% volume growth year to year in the worst time we’ve seen the automotive market in [years].”

While accessing startup funding is notoriously challenging in Delaware, Clappe said WhipFlip has been backed by an angel network and Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Southeastern Pennsylvania. It’s now ready to raise it’s first institutional round, allowing the startup to continue to scale — something Clappe says he intends to do in Delaware, as long as Delaware doesn’t hold the company back.

“As a lifelong Delawarean, I think Delaware’s future is wide open,” he said. “If we somehow become a unicorn one day — which in our industry is not hard to do if you execute — I want to put Delaware on the map, but Delaware is also going to have to help us, too. PA is right over the line. We’ve had a few institutionals saying, ‘We focus primarily on providing capital to PA-based companies, would you move five miles up and we could talk?’ But we’re not there yet.”