Truebil, which is an online marketplace enabling users to buy and sell second-hand cars, has raised to the north of $5 Million in its Series A round. And venture capital firms which participated includes Kalaari Capital, Inventus Capital, Tekton Ventures and Kae Capital.
The funding is being used by the company to expand its operations to Mumbai and a few other cities across the nation. The company is also planning to scale up to four cities, including Bangalore and Delhi.
The Mumbai-based car trading platform, which was founded by Suraj Kalwani, Ravi Chirania, Shubh Bansal, Rakesh Raman, Ritesh Pandey, Shanu Vivek and Himanshu Singhal. Few of the founder were also the employees of Housing.com.
Commenting about the differentiating factor in their company, Suraj Kalwani, co-founder and CEO of the company, said,
The difference between classifieds players and us is that we handhold a customer throughout the experience, helping close the transaction.
The company started its operations in March 2015. However, unlike other car selling websites like CarDekho and CarTrade, Truebil is focused on a rather unique, peer-to-peer sale of cars. The platform offers features like free inspection, valuation, quick sell guarantee, vehicle buying consulting, smooth paper transfer, loan assistance and insurance among others.
At Truebil, each car undergoes an intensive inspection by the in-house automobile engineers before Truebil team lists the verified cars on the platform.
Soon after starting its operations in 2015, the company raised $500K in funding from Kae Capital and Anupam Mittal. Currently, the company claims to be doing around 200 transactions a month, with gross value of Rs. 5 crore.
After scaling operations in four cities, which also includes Delhi and Bangalore in around 12 months, the company is targeting close to 1,500 transactions a month.
Commenting about investing in Truebil, Rutvik Doshi, director at Inventus Capital, said,
One thing that we are convinced about is horizontal classifieds will start getting unbundled and specialised. Used-car sales is a large market with high ticket sizes, but extremely inefficient.
In this space, the company competes with the likes of CarDekho, CarTrade, Quikr, OLX, and Droom, which has raised around $18 million in two funding rounds. However, considering how Trubil’s model is completely different from what these above, ‘usual classified’ websites offer, the startup could safely call itself in a niche of its own.
