Car marketplace to accelerate through Southeast Asia with $5.3m series A

The Carro team. Photo credit: Carro.

Singaporean car marketplace Carro has raised US$5.3 million in a series A round, it announced this morning. The round was led by Indonesia-based Venturra Capital, which is backed by the country’s Lippo group of companies. Other investors included Singtel Innov8, Golden Gate Ventures, Alpha JWC Ventures, Skystar Capital, Coffee Ventures, and GMO Venture Partners.

The startup will use the funding for market expansion. “We are on track to bring Carro to over 350 million people in Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand by the end of 2016,” says CEO Aaron Tan, who used to be part of Singtel Innov8, which participated in this series A.

The startup takes care of car inspection and seller certification to guarantee you won’t be stuck with a lemon.

It will also step up recruitment across the board. It’s currently hiring for iOS and Android developers, car specialists, marketers, and more.

“The top priority for me is to accelerate expansion into regional markets, followed by consolidating leadership in Singapore and launching new product lines,” Aaron tells Tech in Asia.

The team will attack market expansion with caution as to what makes each country tick. “While we want to believe that there are strong similarities in culture etc, each market is going to be very different both on the regulatory front and on the market front,” Aaron says.

“We feel that the only right way to expand into these markets would be to make our products and systems as flexible as possible from the ground up,” he adds. “At this stage, we will probably launch with a variant of our main product for each market. And we have the luxury of doing so given all our technical background – we can build and churn through products faster than anyone in the market does.”

Carro is an end-to-end car marketplace, connecting car sellers and buyers through a website and a mobile app and helps them go through all stages of the transaction, including providing loan and insurance services. The company takes care of car inspection and seller certification to guarantee you won’t be stuck with a lemon at the end of the day.

The company has been growing 30 percent month-on-month since it launched in November 2015. The team says it’s going to hit more than US$74 million in consumer spending by the end of the year.

In the last few months, Carro has added several new products to its line-up, including Graph.sg, on which people can calculate the value of their car in order to determine the best price. The site uses machine learning and Carro’s own data sources to make sure the prices are up to date and as fair as possible for both parties.

Another new one is Carro Accessories, an online shop for car-related gadgets. The startup’s latest feature is Carro Workshop, a mobile app that helps users pick the right maintenance shop for them based on reviews, location, and so on.

Carro had previously raised a seed round worth US$712,000 in November.

Converted from Singapore dollars. US$1 = S$1.36