CCC: Extending to Suppliers and Building an Industry Platform

CCC Intelligent Solutions (CCC) is a company everyone should know about. They have, over their multi-decade history, built the archetype of what a wildly ambitious vertical SaaS company can aspire to be. Their differentiation has been strategically extending a software platform through the entire value chain and significantly increasing their TAM. Starting as a software tool that automated a portion of claims appraisal for auto insurers, CCC leveraged its initial position  to connect auto body repair shops (the “suppliers” in the insurance claims process) and then expanded further to integrate parts vendors (the suppliers’ suppliers). Over three decades, CCC evolved from a niche claims tool into critical infrastructure for the entire auto insurance economy, engaging nearly the entire industry on an industry platform, and generating a multi-billion dollar market cap in the process. As of Q1 2025, the company has an annual run rate of nearly $1 billion. 

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This journey exemplifies key themes from our Vertical SaaS Knowledge Project (VSKP), showing how a vertical software company can win, expand, and extend to become an industry-wide platform. The following case study explores how CCC identified the opportunity to bring suppliers onto its platform, built a multi-sided marketplace (CCC Parts), and solidified its role as a one-stop platform across the auto claims value chain.

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Extending to the Supplier: Connecting Repair Shops to Insurers

CCC’s initial success came from serving auto insurers. The company’s early product helped insurance carriers determine the value of a totaled car with a data-intensive appraisal service software product​. Realizing that totaled cars were only ~10% of accidents, CCC quickly expanded into the far larger need: estimating repair costs for the 90% of accidents where the vehicle is repaired​. In doing so, CCC built claims management software that became mission-critical for insurers, powering decisions that represent 80% of an insurance company's spend. This claims platform, enriched by hyper-local data on parts, labor, and repair procedures, earned deep trust from insurers by delivering highly reliable estimates​. By the early 2000s, CCC had won a leadership position in auto claims management, effectively becoming their system-of-record for collision claims.

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Rather than stop at a strong insurer software business, CCC looked to the next level of the value chain: auto body repair shops. These repair facilities are the “suppliers” who fulfill the repair work for insurers, and historically the insurer–repairer relationship was fragmented and friction-laden. In an earlier conversation with Tidemark, Githesh Ramamurthy (CCC’s CEO) described the problem:

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“The fundamental consumer problem was that an insurance company could write an estimate, but then some repair facilities are going to say it will cost less, some say it will cost more. And the consumer is [stuck] in the middle of that. What we started working with was feedback from an early customer who said, “This model is really broken. We need to engage with a network of repair facilities. We then started building out the platform for repair facilities.”

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CCC saw an opportunity to streamline this broken process by bringing repair shops onto the same platform as insurers. 

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The most common objection for supply side extension is that customers think it may be difficult to transition to a model where a software platform acts as an intermediary between industry participants. They (understandably) worry about supplier onboarding and other activities and think they would be better alone. The role of the VSaaS is to demonstrate how participating in this extension will 1) benefit the entire industry and 2) incentivize each individual participant. In the auto claims industry market this looks like:

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• Consumers having a smoother and more integrated experience across the claims and repair process
• Insurance companies feeling confident in the repair work being done for their customers
• Repair shops experiencing dramatically reduced back-office complexity

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TAM is a great reason to extend for a vertical SaaS company, but to make it work, each industry participant has to have a clear value proposition.

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The result for CCC was a network linking insurance companies on one side and thousands of collision repair shops on the other. Through CCC, an insurer could electronically assign a claim to an in-network repair shop, and the shop would receive the job instantly, along with all relevant customer and vehicle information​. This innovation, known in the industry as the “direct repair” model, fundamentally improved the experience for everyone involved. When a policyholder arrives at a CCC-network shop, instead of navigating everything themselves, they get a magical customer experience, “Hi [Customer], we’ve been expecting you. Your assignment is already with us, and here are the keys to a rental car.” 

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CCC is key to streamlining that intake​. The shop writes the repair estimate on the same CCC platform the insurer uses, ensuring both parties see consistent information, and the insurer can seamlessly follow up on the repair quality​. This coordinated workflow delivered a significantly better consumer experience, while also being more cost efficient for the carrier, and more productive for the repair shop.

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A critical factor in making this two-sided (insurer–shop) network work was trust and neutrality. CCC had to align incentives between parties that don’t always naturally align (are you sure that part can’t just be repaired vs. replacing it altogether?). CCC achieved this by being  a neutral, transparent arbiter of data​, something we have sometimes called an industry ledger.

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“Dave (Tidemark) played an important role in the expansion of our strategy to support several other areas beyond insurers and collision repairers,” said Ramamurthy. “With deep understanding of multi-sided networks, he helped us think through additional offerings and was instrumental as we sought to expand into parts and OEM.”

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This strong position  on the “supplier” side of the insurance industry set the stage for CCC’s next major extension: building a marketplace for the repair shops’ own suppliers.

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Extending to the Supplier’s Supplier: CCC Parts and the Multi-Sided Marketplace

With insurers and repair shops transacting on CCC’s platform, the company identified another adjacent problem to solve: parts procurement for collision repairs. Parts represent a significant portion of each repair job (an average collision repair needs ~$1,700–$1,800 in parts)​, and the process of finding, ordering, and reconciling parts was a notorious pain point for shops. This typically involved dozens of phone calls, faxes, and manual paperwork between a repair shop and various parts distributors – an offline, error-prone routine. CCC saw a natural opportunity to extend its platform to digitize and streamline the parts ordering workflow.

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Similar to the repair shop extension, this was a move that benefited all industry participants:

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• ‍Shops: Their business model is a throughput business and they want to repair as many cars as possible through the garage. The limiter is parts availability and technicians.  If parts procurement wasn't calls and faxes, but automatically triggered as soon as the repair was assigned, they could significantly increase sales. ‍
• Parts provider: Significantly decreased sales costs while simultaneously increasing sales volume.‍
• Consumers: Get faster service at cheaper prices due to increased car service volumes.
• ‍Insurers: Speeding up parts ordering reduces the overall cycle time for repairs, streamlining second-order costs like vehicle rental that insurers often pay.

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Few software companies manage to build true marketplaces, but CCC had a key advantage: an installed base of buyers (repair shops) already on its platform. By embedding a “click to order parts” feature directly into the estimating software, CCC turned the once tedious parts procurement process into a seamless digital experience. A repair shop writing an estimate in CCC could now simply add needed parts to a shopping cart and order them electronically from within the same interface. Crucially, because CCC’s platform linked to the suppliers’ back-end inventory and invoicing systems, the order and invoice data flowed automatically eliminating manual reconciliation for the shop manager​.

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Building this marketplace was not an overnight success – in fact, CCC tried and failed twice before cracking the code​. Earlier attempts struggled, partly because coverage and liquidity were insufficient. CCC learned that to succeed, the marketplace needed breadth of supply and local density. In its third and successful attempt, CCC took a two-pronged approach:

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• Broad supplier participation: CCC made the marketplace agnostic to part type and supplier – involving “OEM car companies, aftermarket suppliers, and recyclers alike.​ Winning the support of automakers was especially critical. Once OEMs saw the platform as “a great tool for their parts dealers,” they encouraged their 400–2,500 dealers to join​. Today, CCC has more than 5,500 suppliers on its network,
• Hyper-local rollout for density: CCC realized that marketplace adoption would flourish city by city. As Ramamurthy previously explained: "The first two times, we thought about markets in terms of large geographies. [The] third time, we had the data to look for hyperlocal markets where we had density.”​ The team identified regions (for example, the Pacific Northwest) where CCC already had a high concentration of repair shops and a robust network of parts sellers, and deployed focused teams on the ground to jump-start the marketplace in those areas​. These teams would coordinate with local suppliers and shops to drive adoption, essentially seeding both sides of the marketplace locally. By replicating this playbook market by market, CCC built up a critical mass of both shops (buyers) and suppliers in each region, eventually stitching together a nationwide parts marketplace that had sticky, habitual usage.

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This extension into a marketplace also prompted an evolution in CCC’s business model and monetization. Historically, CCC’s revenue came from software fees or transactional services paid by insurers and repair shops (for example, insurers might pay per claim processed, and shops might license the CCC software). With a two-sided parts marketplace and payment flows now on the platform, CCC could generate transaction-based revenue by facilitating parts sales and related payments. In effect, CCC’s take rate grew as it added more marketplace services. 

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CCC now processes well over $100 billion of commerce every year on its platform across insurers, repairers, parts suppliers and more​. Even a modest take rate on that volume translates to significant revenue.

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Becoming the Auto Insurance Industry Platform

Through its extensions first to repair facilities and then to parts suppliers, CCC transformed itself into far more than a claims software vendor: it became the platform that underpins the auto insurance ecosystem. Today, CCC’s network connects virtually every stakeholder in the P&C insurance economy: insurance carriers, collision repairers, OEMs and parts distributors, paint and materials suppliers, rental car companies (for replacement vehicles), lenders and banks (for payments), even medical providers and payers involved in auto injury claims​. 

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The trust CCC earned over decades made each new extension easier: when CCC moved from insurers into adjacent areas (repair, then parts, then OEMs, etc.), industry players checked its reputation and found a long history of integrity​. That trust is the key thing. As Ramamurthy explained: 

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“The trust factor is extraordinarily important, and that is such a fundamental part of our business model. It’s not only trust, but trust and performance. You’ve got to deliver both…the trust we developed was the degree of precision, the ability to make reliable decisions. This manifests inside CCC through our vision to shape a world where life just works for our customers and theirs. Decisions we make internally works in support of this ideal, which has been our core belief for decades, and is well understood and embraced across our team of engineers, data scientists, service and support professionals and more.”

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And while trust is unlikely to ever make it into a management consultant’s slide deck, it is a key driver of growth for CCC today.

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“Over the last 20 years, I can tell you that we have reported  faster organic growth rates than we’ve ever reported. Part of it is the power of the absolute integrity with which you operate. That integrity wasn't free. It bounded what we would even consider, but it’s the basis of our reputation. We’ve seen the power of that integrity, especially as we branched into adjacent areas. We have gone from working with insurers to repair facilities, repair facilities to parts providers, parts providers to OEMs. We've made these transitions to adjacent verticals and adjacent industries; they all check back with others and because of the longevity (people usually stay in this industry for a very long time), we've been enormous beneficiaries of word-of-mouth. As people move from company to company or industry to industry, that integrity has paid off massively.”

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This goodwill, combined with the tangible benefits CCC delivered, meant stakeholders were willing to join the platform as it expanded. The result is a multi-sided platform with self-reinforcing network effects. An upstart trying to compete with CCC today would not only have to sell software to insurers or shops; it would have to replicate an entire connected network of insurers, shops, parts suppliers, and others – all while CCC’s network and data advantages continue to expand.

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CCC’s evolution illustrates several core vertical SaaS theses: 

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1. Vertical software companies can achieve market leadership and set de facto standards in their niche, which then enables them to expand offerings. 
2. They can unlock network effects by connecting multiple sides of an industry (something horizontal SaaS rarely does).
3. By extending through the value chain, they can dramatically expand their addressable market and embed themselves more deeply into the industry’s workflows. 

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In CCC’s case, each step of extension—from insurer to repairer to parts provider—not only opened a new revenue opportunity but also strengthened the whole value proposition for existing users (e.g. the insurer software became more valuable once more repair shops were connected, and the repair shop product became more valuable once parts could be ordered seamlessly). Such extensions, when executed well, make sure everybody wins and lead to a better business and a more functional market overall​.

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By becoming critical infrastructure for the auto claims industry, CCC has achieved what few software companies have – true platform status in a large industry, with durable growth, and an indispensable role in delivering better experiences for businesses and consumers alike. CCC is the archetype and exemplar of vertical SaaS, demonstrating how to start with a wedge, then expand and extend to ultimately transform the consumer experience and become part of the industry fabric itself.