For Mexico’s thousands of ride-hail drivers, the roadblock isn’t demand. It’s access.
Drivers are under-served in a ride-hailing industry already worth more than $3.5 billion and projected to grow steadily in the years ahead.
The original concept for OneCarNow (OCN) was a peer-to-peer rental marketplace connecting car owners and short-term renters. Within a few months, a pattern emerged. It became clear that the real demand wasn’t from casual renters, but from full-time gig drivers working for platforms like Uber and DiDi who were shut out of traditional financing. This revealed a major gap in the market: fewer than 3% of ride-hail drivers qualify for traditional auto loans. And even if they do, they face double-digit interest rates, long approval processes and high upfront costs.
“We thought we were building a car-sharing marketplace, but we quickly realized that almost everyone applying was a ride-share driver,” says Mairon Sandoval, the company’s founder. “They weren’t just looking for convenience; they had no other way to access financing. That’s when we realized how big the need was.”
Six months after launching the marketplace, the country manager of ride-hailing giant Cabify reached out and urged the team to focus on gig workers. They operate within a highly restrictive banking system where fewer than 20% of citizens have credit scores above 600, and traditional credit checks overlook more meaningful indicators of repayment, including cash flow, Sandoval says.
OCN began analyzing trip and earnings data from ride-hail platforms to understand risk and repayment patterns, insights that later were the backbone of its underwriting system.
Enabling Access Through a Proprietary Tech Stack
OCN is a fix for a longstanding problem: a fintech and AI platform built from scratch that assesses drivers’ true ability to pay. The model combines flexible car subscriptions with a rent-to-own path, giving drivers a way to build ownership over time while removing upfront barriers. It streamlines onboarding and bundles insurance, maintenance and 24/7 support into a single, all-inclusive subscription.
What makes OCN remarkable is how it turned that model into profitable growth at scale, an achievement rarely seen in asset-heavy sectors. On the surface it may look like a car subscription company, but under the hood it’s a technology platform.
The company chose to build its technology platform fully in-house since no comparable tools on the market were available.
“The infrastructure was simply not there,” Sandoval says. “When we launched OCN, we had to figure out our own eligibility criteria and learn from the drivers and cars that didn’t perform well. As we gathered more data, our analysis improved, but when we looked for outside tools, we found there was nothing built for the gig-economy niche. Every trip generates data, and we use that information to make financing accessible.”
Through its own AI-powered underwriting, onboarding, and asset management systems, OCN has become the largest gig fleet in Mexico, and is now gearing up to expand across Latin America. In Mexico alone, OCN is investing $150 million to triple its fleet to 15,000 vehicles and grow its employee base in the country.
OCN’s Business Model
I first met Mairon in early 2023, not long after OCN’s launch in Q2 2022. The concept was simple but powerful: give ride-share drivers quick, affordable access to new cars without large upfront costs. Through OCN’s online platform, applicants could be approved in less than 90 minutes and receive a vehicle within two business days.
OCN evaluates each applicant through multiple data sources, pulling ride-share performance metrics directly from Uber or DiDi, verifying income through open-banking data, running background checks, and conducting remote home visits to confirm parking or charging capacity.
For drivers who can’t access traditional credit markets, it’s a lifeline. For OCN, it was the first step toward building a financial and technology platform for the gig economy. The company’s underwriting model has proven effective in maintaining high payment rates.
“If you make more money as an OCN customer, you never default,” Sandoval says. “We keep the cars in good condition, we keep them under regulatory compliance, and we track weekly payments to spot risks early. We’re very proactive in terms of default prevention … that’s why OCN has maintained a single-digit default rate on a monthly basis, consistently for the past two years.”
The majority of drivers in Mexico and Brazil don’t own their vehicles, with many relying on informal rentals or predatory loans. With OCN, this paradigm is replaced by a standardized, transparent subscription that includes maintenance, insurance and eventually ownership.
Here’s what OCN looked like in its early days:
- Product: Flexible, all-inclusive vehicle subscriptions with potential purchase options.
- Traction: Early success in Mexico City with Uber and DiDi drivers.
- Team: A small but driven group, focused on scaling supply and meeting overwhelming demand.
Now let’s look at where OCN is today, in late 2025:
- Product: More than a fleet, OCN runs a proprietary technology stack that spans customer experience systems, asset and vendor management, AI-powered underwriting, and a seamless payments ecosystem. These tools, built entirely in-house, replace expensive third-party SaaS and give OCN a long-term cost and data advantage.
- Traction: OCN is the #1 gig fleet in Mexico, and is now expanding into Brazil. Importantly, the business is profitable, netting considerably higher margins compared to publicly traded peers.
- Team: A world-class product and engineering team led by an ex-Uber product leader, supported by global hires. The company now has ~90 employees, including senior talent from billion-dollar companies in emerging markets.
Behind those metrics are tens of thousands of drivers whose livelihoods depend on consistent access to vehicles.
Three pillars of OCN’s momentum stand out:
1. Efficiency Through Tech
OCN’s centralized, AI-powered platform underpins every part of operations.
- Driver onboarding: Automated identity checks, document verification, virtual home visits, and AI onboarding agents cut processing time dramatically.
- Risk and underwriting: Proprietary AI models evaluate drivers who often lack traditional credit history. OCN has kept default rates extremely low by mining years of gig economy data. Its algorithms capture the ‘real-world credit data’ of gig workers, including earnings consistency, platform ratings and trip history.
- Fleet and vendor management: Direct integrations with maintenance and repair networks streamline compliance and asset tracking, while blockchain-based vehicle histories are being piloted to increase transparency and residual values.
The result: faster scaling with fewer people, and better economics than competitors.
2. Growth and Profitability
Unlike most asset-heavy models, OCN is scaling while remaining profitable. OCN’s margins stem from vertical integration, controlling everything from underwriting to resale.
The company’s unit economics work because it concentrates vehicle purchases with two OEM partners and standardizes the models it deploys. This approach reduces procurement costs, simplifies maintenance and improves resale values. It also delivers economies of scale and greater affordability for drivers, Sandoval says.
These efficiencies flow directly into stronger asset performance and healthier margins.
- Residual values: Vehicles resold after contracts are generating strong resale value, given innovative service and vehicle history.
- Cost of capital: Company is providing detailed, timely, information on each and every asset, ensuring credit providers have improved confidence leading to better terms and faster acceleration.
- Operational excellence: AI and technology improvements in customer service, collections, customer verification and back-office workflows have led the company to achieve higher efficiency metrics while reducing expenses compared to previous models and others in the industry.
Community Impact
In a short time, OCN’s model has expanded financial access for gig drivers in Mexico and Brazil. For many, the car is more than a work tool; it’s among the most valuable assets they are likely to own. The company’s rent-to-own approach offers a path to ownership that traditional rental models do not, and provides drivers with a sense of pride and long-term stability.
“A car is usually the second most valuable asset a person will have after a home,” says Sandoval. “Because drivers can eventually own the vehicle, they treat it like it’s already theirs. We cover maintenance and insurance, but they’re personally invested in keeping it in good condition.”
He points to one early customer, a 21-year-old courier who started delivering food by bicycle, upgraded to a motorcycle, and eventually got behind the wheel of an OCN car. He purchased that same car through the program and now earns more than 80,000 pesos a month, roughly ten times Mexico’s minimum wage.
As incomes rise, so do opportunities. Drivers can afford private schooling for their children or better healthcare for their families.
“People are truly living social mobility that used to take two to three generations in a span of three to five years,” he says.
What’s next?
OCN’s near-term focus is disciplined: double down on Mexico and begin expansion into new markets, accelerate growth based on improving economics and access to capital, while maintaining the ability to self-sustain.
“The OCN subscription is just the window to the gig economy,” Sandoval says. “We want to enter multiple markets by replicating the same scale, strategy, and levers that we have in Mexico and that we are also implementing in Brazil.” The same OEM and insurance partners operate in both countries, he observes, which lets OCN standardize processes, ensure the best pricing and streamline operations internally and with vendors.
The model can extend to other emerging regions such as the Middle East, North Africa, and Southeast Asia.
OCN is also expanding its product offerings for existing drivers, including new credit products. “Today it’s mostly buy-now-pay-later programs for things like insurance deductibles or vehicle parts,” Sandoval says. “We’re launching pilots with top-performing drivers to offer small, on-demand personal loans.”
The focus now, he says, is execution, proving the model can scale profitably across Latin America before entering other emerging markets.
Over the longer term, OCN’s proprietary technology, which includes AI underwriting, payments, asset management, and blockchain-based tracking, positions the company well to expand its service offering.
Congrats to Mairon and the entire OCN team on building one of the most exciting fintech + AI platforms in the gig economy. What started as a flexible car subscription service has evolved into a technology company with the potential to redefine how gig workers access vehicles, credit, and financial services across emerging markets.
OCN is a great example of how our investment strategy comes to life. On the surface, it may look like a physical asset business, but what sets it apart is how it ties directly to our two key focus areas: Vertical AI and Embedded Finance. Their proprietary systems use AI to handle complex tasks like underwriting and fleet management, while embedded financial tools power payments, collections and driver support. That combination — AI that does the work and software that moves money — is exactly the model we believe delivers capital-efficient, defensible growth.
