Dealer software vendor CarNow has appointed Kayne Grau, a former executive at Cars.com and Apartments.com, as CEO and board member effective immediately.
Kayne Grau
Grau replaces Andy Park, who founded CarNow 10 years ago.
CarNow, based in Atlanta, provides digital-retail and messaging tools to more than 5,000 dealership rooftops across the U.S. Founded in 2014, the company has attracted $3 million in investment, according to Crunchbase. The company’s LinkedIn page lists 251 employees.
Grau has held senior leadership positions at a number of big tech companies in and outside the automotive sector going back to the early 1990s.
He served as CTO of Cars.com from 2008 to 2012 and after that worked two years in the same role at Apartments.com before it was acquired by the CoStar Group in 2014.
Grau has also held executive positions at eToys, DirecTV, and AllState Insurance. In 2015, Grau co-founded Driven, a vendor of software that helps dealerships acquire and market used cars, and two years later, as CEO, he helped integrate it with KAR Global (now “Openlane”), which acquired Driven for $43 million. Grau worked at KAR/Openlane for the next three years, ending his time there in 2020 as VP of dealer inventory solutions.
For the past two years, Grau has held board memberships at multiple companies alongside a job as CEO of Uptake, which provides asset-management software to clients such as Caterpillar and Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Energy.
Grau replaces Park, who had served as CarNow’s CEO until recently. The hiring announcement gave no word on Park’s next steps.