David Gruhin

David Gruhin got there by way of a pinball machine. Before automotive ever crossed his mind, he had already built and sold a mobile content platform with two million subscribers, then spent years as a senior developer at Prometheus Global Media - the parent company of Billboard and The Hollywood Reporter - engineering branded content experiences for Mercedes-Benz, American Express, and Delta Airlines. It was the kind of work that teaches you how content systems behave at scale: what breaks, what compounds, and what quietly rots when nobody is watching.

The pivot happened in 2016. Gruhin purchased a pinball machine from a Dealer Principal who ran the Kia of Bedford group outside Cleveland. Somewhere between the transaction and the small talk, the DP learned what Gruhin did for a living and offered him a job managing digital marketing for the dealership group. On his eighth day in the automotive industry, Matt Copley walked in for a PureCars pitch. They bonded immediately over a shared obsession with marketing and technology. Neither of them knew it yet, but that introduction would define the next decade of their careers.

For about a year, Gruhin did what engineers do: he observed, measured, and identified inefficiencies that nobody else seemed interested in fixing. He was the data nerd in a room full of car people, and the car people had their own way of doing things. Then one morning, the calculus changed. He arrived at work to find the General Manager's office empty. The GSM was gone too. The owner - the same man who had sold him the pinball machine - met him in the hallway and told him to go run the store.

Gruhin took the job. The veteran sales staff did not make it easy. He responded the only way he knew how: by treating the dealership like a software development organization. He set up Jira for every department. Every complaint, every broken process, every missed opportunity became a logged ticket. He organized the chaos into two-week sprints and started solving problems in order of impact. He brought in Tim Tallion as General Sales Manager to complement his process-driven approach with boots-on-the-ground sales leadership. Slowly, the pushback gave way to buy-in, because the numbers were impossible to argue with. Ad expenses dropped. Location-targeted Waze ads drove a 57% increase in service leads and a $100,000 monthly increase in gross. Sales volume doubled. By the end of 2018, Kia of Bedford ranked as the 10th largest Kia dealer by volume in the United States. Automotive News and Street Fight Magazine both covered the turnaround.

What Gruhin saw from the GM chair, though, was bigger than one store. The entire industry was running on the same broken loop: hire an agency, produce some content, watch the person who understood the strategy leave, start over. No institutional knowledge. No compounding. No system. He co-founded SearchDRVN with Dealer Principal Matthew Taylor and Chris Reid, his former Spectrum Reach rep at Kia of Bedford whose deep expertise in radio and TV media buying made him a natural partner. Together they helped dealerships across multiple states optimize their marketing and operations, and confirmed the pattern at every store they touched. Then the pandemic hit, and with it came a used-vehicle acquisition crisis that crippled dealer inventories nationwide. Gruhin, Taylor, and Burt Davidson co-founded Cheddar Auto to solve it: a consumer-facing platform that let dealerships buy pre-owned vehicles directly from the public, bypassing auctions entirely. Owners entered their vehicle information, received an instant Accutrade-powered appraisal, and could schedule a same-day pickup or drop-off at the dealership. Will Michael came on as Controller and worked directly with Gruhin to design and build the automation systems that turned manual vehicle buying into a scalable operation. Cheddar Auto became the largest volume lead generator on the Accutrade valuation platform, routinely acquiring 150+ pre-owned vehicles per month for its dealer clients. Ken Ganley Companies, one of the largest dealer groups in the Midwest, acquired it in November 2022.

All the while, he and Copley kept circling the same idea: that someone needed to build the content infrastructure the industry was missing. Not another agency. Not another point solution. A system. After Gruhin's exit from Cheddar Auto and Copley's departure from PureCars - where he'd spent seven years rising to VP of Sales - the two finally had the space to build it. They brought in Dan Strauss, a veteran content-platform architect Gruhin had worked alongside at Prometheus, as Co-Founder and COO. Michael joined as Co-Founder and CFO, bringing the financial discipline from Cheddar Auto. Hrizn launched in 2023.

The philosophy behind the platform is the same one that turned a struggling dealership into a national top-ten performer: content is not a campaign you run - it is infrastructure you build. That conviction could only come from someone who had written the code, sat in the GM chair, and watched the industry fail at the same problem for years. Gruhin is all three.