Hong Kong-based VC firm Integrated Asset Management and Japanese tech firm Digital Garage led the round, with participation from existing investors
Droom, a mobile-first marketplace to buy and sell new and used automobiles including aeroplanes in India, has closed US$20 million in Series C funding, led by Integrated Asset Management (IAM), a Hong Kong-based private investment office, and Japanese tech firm Digital Garage.
A number of institutional investors and family offices from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, in addition to all of its existing investors, have also participated in the round.
The newly-raised capital will be leveraged to build on its tech platform and drive greater adoption of its tools, such as History, ECO, OBV and Credit.
Droom Founder and CEO Sandeep Aggarwal said: “Series C rounds typically accelerate the pace of growth for a business and help it establish its undisputed leadership in its sector and that’s exactly the case with us. This fresh capital infusion into our war chest will once and for all give us an unchallenged competitive edge, not just in the online automobile space but in the e-commerce landscape at large.”
The fresh funding comes over a year after it secured an undisclosed sum in Series B, led by Singapore-based VC firm Beenext and Digital Garage in June last year. The new investment takes Droom’s total funding raised since inception to US$65 million.
Siddharth Talwar, Co-founder & Partner, Lightbox, an existing investor, said Droom’s core technology products to support its marketplace from its pricing engine Orange Book Value to Droom History to ECO and now Credit enables them to provide tremendous transparency to consumers throughout the country.
Droom was founded by Aggarwal, who is also co-founder and former CEO of ShopClues, an e-commerce unicorn in India. Droom is an online marketplace for buying and selling new and used automobiles. It has four marketplace formats — B2C, C2C, C2B and B2B, and three pricing formats — fixed price, best offer and auction. The platform offers wide range of categories from bicycle to plane and all automobile services such as warranty, RSA, insurance and auto loan.
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It has built tech and data science heavy tools to create the entire ecosystem around used automobiles, including OBV (pricing engine), Eco (121 points vehicle inspection), History (200 mil vehicle history records), Discovery (dozens of pre-buying tools) and Credit (India’s first and only marketplace for used vehicles loans).
The company claims it is currently clocking over US$554 million in annualised GMV at a growth rate of 350 per cent YoY, has over 159,000 auto dealers, has presence in 500-plus cities across India, has nearly 24 million-plus monthly visitors and over 5.8 million app downloads.
Droom is a Singapore holding company with subsidiaries in India and the US. It is headquartered in Gurgaon, with a team size of over 260 employees.
Aggarwal was recently in the news when he accused his wife and Co-founder Radhika Aggarwal of stripping his voting rights at ShopClues and having illicit relationship with its other co-founder Sanjay Sethi. In a series of Facebook posts, Sandeep had accused Radhika, who is ShopClues’s Chief Business Officer, of “intentionally and deliberately kicking out other founding team members by collaborating with once illicit love affair partner” and “changing web history, tempering with Wikipedia and lying in the press.”
However, ShopClues investors came out in support of the current leadership comprising Radhika and Sethi.
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Source: e27
