Second-hand car auction platform Motorway hits Unicorn status after $190M raise with Index, ICONIQ – TechCrunch

It was solely in June that Motorway – a U.Okay. platform on which skilled automotive sellers can bid in an public sale for privately owned vehicles on the market – raised $67.7 million in a Collection B spherical. It’s now raised a $190m Collection C funding spherical led by Index Ventures and ICONIQ Progress, a number one Silicon Valley expertise progress funding agency. Current traders Latitude, Unbound, and BMW i Ventures additionally participated within the spherical. The startup is now claiming a valuation of over $1bn.

A part of the reason being the affect of the COVID pandemic on provide chains. Second-hand vehicles have boomed in value as a result of new vehicles are being made in smaller numbers because of the lack of provide of pc chips and different important gear from China.

On Motorway customers can promote their automotive by way of a smartphone app that additionally makes use of pc imaginative and prescient to evaluate the state of the automotive. The vehicles are then bid on by skilled automotive sellers in a every day on-line public sale, with the automotive collected totally free by the profitable vendor inside 24 hours. Given it’s additionally a “contactless” course of, sellers and automotive house owners more and more looking for to purchase and promote vehicles on-line.

Motorway says it now has a community of 4,000 skilled automotive sellers utilizing the platform and claims it has booked a 300% uplift in third-quarter gross sales to $411 million in contrast with $105 million final 12 months. Some 100,000 used vehicles have been bought on Motorway since launch, with over 8,000 vehicles presently being bought a month, with over $2bn projected accomplished gross sales over the subsequent 12 months.

Motorway can be asserting the appointment of James Wilson, former Director of Market Success for Amazon UK, as Chief Working Officer.

Tom Leathes, CEO of Motorway, stated: “8,000 automotive gross sales a month remains to be lower than one p.c of UK used automotive gross sales – so there’s an enormous alternative forward.”

Danny Rimer, Associate at Index Ventures, stated: “Since becoming a member of the board, following our preliminary funding in June, I’ve skilled first-hand simply how briskly Motorway is rising and the way agile the workforce is in scaling the enterprise to assist this unimaginable progress.”

Yoonkee Sull, Associate at ICONIQ Progress stated: “The used automotive market’s transfer on-line is just accelerating and we imagine Motorway is delivering the very best shopper expertise and essentially the most differentiated provide to sellers within the UK.”

This newest funding brings Motorway’s all-time elevate to $273m because it was based by Leathes, Harry Jones and Alex Buttle in 2017.

In a name with me Leathes added: “There’s no reference to BMW significantly, however they’re automotive specialists so they bring about numerous information to the white broader market and tendencies which can be occurring. They have been additionally a part of the B together with Latitude and Unbound.”

“What motorway does in another way to numerous rivals is that we’re we’re not a retailer. We don’t personal stock. We’re a market. And in order that that enables us to scale rather more rapidly,” he stated.