Rocket Internet’s car classifieds site Carmudi gets $25M to dive deeper into Asia

Rocket Internet-backed car classifieds site Carmudi today announced a fresh investment round of US$25 million, adding on to the US$10 million it raised early last year. Rocket Internet and Ooredoo’s joint venture Asia Pacific Internet Group (APACIG), Holtzbrinck Ventures, Tengelmann Ventures, and a private investor participated in the latest funding round. The investment will be used to boost its operations in Mexico and Asia.

In a statement, the company claims to be seeing a growth rate of over 50 percent across all 20 of its markets – seven of which are in Asia. It also says it has listings of over 300,000 vehicles globally, and has around five million users every month, though it is not clear what percentage of those users are active.

The investment demonstrates Rocket Internet’s confidence in Carmudi. According to Stefan Haubold, co-founder and global managing director of Carmudi, the car classifieds site is doing well in several Asian markets, such as Philippines, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam.

“We are on track in all our markets. In general, we are gaining ground in those markets where people have the financial means to buy and sell cars and motorcycles, and there is ample infrastructure in place,” he explains. “Political and economic stability plays a great role as well.”

In Asia, Haubold doesn’t see many competitors in the car classifieds space – none that would give him “any headache,” anyway. “So our focus is on growing the overall market, getting people from offline to online, explaining them how easily they can sell a car in less than two minutes, or how they can choose from thousands of cars on the go,” he says.

He adds that Carmudi has an “appetite” for more Asian markets, but not in the next few months. “Our focus is on the existing countries as we want to win all our current markets […] to reap their full potential,” he says.

See: No employees, no office, and a handful of cash: how a Burmese entrepreneur’s dream came true