Company: TRUE
Filing Date: 2025-02-20
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0001327318-25-000006
Chunk: 54

Company: TrueCar, Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-02-20
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1
Chunk 54
---
urus.com and Cars Commerce (also known as Cars.com), selling inventory-based subscription billing;

•lead generators, such as AutoWeb.com, selling pay-per-lead advertising;

•Internet sites, such as Google and Facebook, selling cost-per-click advertising; and

•offline media, including newspaper, outdoor advertising, radio, television and direct mail.

Technology

We have designed our technology platform, website and products to provide consumers, dealers and other parties with the information they need to affect a successful car purchase. Consumers access this platform through the TrueCar-branded website, affinity group marketing partner websites and TrueCar-branded and affinity group mobile applications. Dealers access the platform through the software tools available on our Dealer Portal. Supporting each of these user interfaces are advanced systems for processing and analyzing automotive data, including features such as vehicle configurators and predictive consumer behavior modeling, as well as our proprietary matching algorithm to compare our transaction-based data sources with our record of online users for processing and billing. Our TrueCar+ offering requires a technological infrastructure that integrates the software and processes used by dealers, lenders and other third parties in order to create a fully-integrated online commerce flow for the car buying process. While a number of key aspects of this infrastructure, such as our unified checkout flow, which allows consumers to view relevant transaction details, landed costs and next steps to complete the purchase of a vehicle, have been developed, additional components that we envision to scale TrueCar+, will require additional technological development. We use a combination of open source and licensed software running on optimized hardware.

Substantially all of our data processing and storage capabilities are cloud-based and sufficiently redundant. We have adopted a centralized approach to quality assurance and testing for our technology platform and all products aimed at enhancing consumer and dealer experiences while seeking to optimize availability, scalability, security and performance.

Intellectual Property

We protect our intellectual property through a combination of patents, copyrights, trademarks, service marks, domain names, trade secret laws, confidentiality procedures and contractual restrictions.

At December 31, 2024, we had 86 U.S. issued patents, 19 pending U.S. patent applications, no issued foreign patents and no pending foreign patent applications. The issued and allowed patents begin expiring in 2028 through 2041. We intend to pursue additional patent protection to the extent we believe it would be beneficial to our competitive position.

11

We have a number of registered and unregistered trademarks. We registered “TrueCar,” “TrueCar+,” the TrueCar logo, various TRUE marks