About Numen AI
Numen AI helps independent performance car dealers across the UK stop chasing cars and start choosing them.
Who I am
I'm Raj Dhillon, and I am the founder of Numen. I graduated as a mechanical engineer and spent three years as a project engineer for a rail freight operator, which was decent work that I was never going to be content doing, because what I actually wanted was to build something of my own. So in March 2026 I started Numen, and by May I had left the rail job to run it full time from the East Midlands. It is the first business I have ever started.
The cars are not an act. I love performance cars and I love driving them, which is the part I care about, rather than collecting them or restoring them or keeping one under a sheet somewhere. I take mine on track when I can, and there is nothing else that makes me feel quite so alive.
Why Numen exists
I went looking for a business to build, and this trade was not the first place I looked. It is the one that worked.
Coming at it as an enthusiast rather than as somebody who had ever stood on a forecourt for a living, I did the only sensible thing available to me and asked. I asked dealers what the biggest problem was, expecting to hear about selling, because that is what an outsider assumes the hard part is.
Nobody said selling.
The dealers I have spoken to kept putting me right on the same point, which is that retailing is not where a specialist dealership struggles. Buying is. Finding the right cars, and keeping them turning.
That answer is also why Numen exists rather than being one more agency pointed at the selling end. There is no shortage of people offering dealers help getting cars sold, but the buying side, which decides whether the forecourt has anything worth selling in the first place, had almost nobody building for it. Building a process and proving it holds up under pressure is what I had spent three years doing, so pointing that at a forecourt instead of a railway was not much of a stretch.
It began broader than it is now, with classic and collector dealers in scope until June 2026, when it became clear they buy differently enough to be a different business altogether. So it is independent performance dealers, in the UK, and nothing else, because I would rather be genuinely useful to a narrow trade than vaguely relevant to a wide one.
What Numen actually does
Numen builds and runs the buying side of a dealership. Not software you log into, and not a list of names to ring, but a way of buying that lives inside your business, built round your forecourt and the cars you actually stock. What that looks like in practice is on the main site.
Tell me how you buy. I'll tell you straight.
Forty-five minutes on your forecourt. If it fits, I'll tell you exactly what I'd build. If it doesn't, I'll tell you that instead.
45 minutes, free, and you will leave with a straight answer either way.