Vroom wound down its car business in January — by November it was in Chapter 11

Vroom was one of the 2020-vintage online used-car platforms: buy vehicles, recondition them, sell and deliver them — an operation funded through a vehicle floorplan facility and capital raises. On 22 January 2024 the company announced it was winding down its ecommerce used-vehicle operations and dealership business: it had been unable to raise the capital needed to fund operations and support an extension of the floorplan facility, due to expire on 31 March 2024. Transactions on vroom.com stopped, purchases halted, inventory moved to wholesale channels, and a reduction in force began.

What remained were the two pieces built to serve others: United Auto Credit Corporation, the auto-lending arm, and CarStory, the analytics and wholesale platform. The shell around them still carried 0.750% unsecured convertible senior notes due 2026. On 12 November 2024 Vroom announced an equity-for-debt recapitalization agreed with holders of about 97.6% of the notes; the next day, 13 November, it filed a prepackaged Chapter 11 in the US Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas.

The plan eliminated approximately $290.5 million of funded debt: the notes were exchanged for equity, with noteholders receiving 92.94% of the new common stock and existing shareholders 7.06%. Ten months after the wind-down, the arithmetic was formal — the cars were gone, what survived was a lender and a software platform serving other people's car businesses, and the public equity that had once funded the whole venture was now one part in fourteen.