Carsome Group, Southeast Asia’s largest integrated car e-commerce platform, has closed its latest funding round on June 19. The latest round brings the group’s liquidity position to around US$200 million ($267.9 million).
The funding round saw broad-based participation from Carsome’s current investors including 65 Equity Partners, Seatown Private Capital Master Fund, Qatar Investment Authority, Gobi Partners, and Asia Partners. The round also attracted a long-term debt facility from a new investor, EvolutionX Debt Capital. This is EvolutionX Debt Capital’s first such investment in Southeast Asia. The growth stage debt financing platform was launched by DBS Bank and Temasek Holdings in July 2021.
In FY2022 ended March 31, 2022, Carsome’s revenue grew by 250% y-o-y to US$1.5 billion. In the 1QFY2023, the group saw its trade margin double y-o-y. Nearly over 80% of the trade margin came from transaction margins, leaving a huge potential upside for ancillary revenue, given the group’s focus on ecosystem offerings such as financing, insurance and aftersales.
“We have spent the last eight years building a more trusted way for customers to transact within Southeast Asia’s used car industry. Our comfortable liquidity position and strong backing from both existing and new investors place us on solid footing to deliver the world’s first integrated car ownership ecosystem, going beyond just buying and selling cars to include ancillary services across the whole ownership lifecycle. I wish to thank all our investors for their continued confidence in our vision and capabilities as we steer the company toward profitability as a group,” says Carsome’s co-founder and group CEO Eric Cheng.
“We are delighted to have our new investor EvolutionX joining us at this stage of our growth,” adds Carsome’s group president and CFO, Juliet Zhu. “Profitability is just one of the milestones in our long-term capital planning, and we will continue to invite the right partners who can add strategic value at different stages of our growth.”
Rahul Shah, partner of EvolutionX says, “We remain focused in supporting category-leading technology companies in our core markets in Asia which are backed by reputed long-term investors. We are excited by Carsome’s continued focus towards achieving profitability during this year and believe that this collective capital raise will optimise its capital structure and improve the financial strength of the company to support its continued journey towards sustainable profitable growth.”
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To date, Carsome currently serves over 15 million unique customers monthly and has sold over 150,000 cars annually.
