Online pre-owned car retailing platform Spinny is all set to enter the coveted unicorn club. The company, which registered two-fold year-on-year growth in car sales from January to August in 2021, is in the final stages of settling funding of around $250-300 million from new and existing investors.
Sources privy to the matter said that Tiger Global and a new investor will lead the round in Spinny with participation from Avenir Growth, General Catalyst, Fundamentum, Accel, and some new investors.
Spinny will be the third company from Gurugram in the used car space to be valued at over $1 billion after Cars24 and Droom.
Swelling business attracting investors
Till August this year, the company recorded two-fold year-on-year growth in car sales to 11,600 units indicating a revival in demand in tier-I and tier-II cities. Encouraged by this sharp growth, which has come on the back of retail network expansion along with the resurgent market, Spinny expects to conclude 2021 at around 28,000 units.
According to sources, this has steered a lot of inbound interest in the company and investors are offering 2X premium in the new round over the last one. “Spinny will be valued anywhere between $1.7-1.9 billion in this round,” said sources.
Spinny, a full-stack used-car retailer, was valued at $750-800 million in its last round. If the deal materializes at this value, Spinny’s valuation will be on par with DST-backed Cars24. Cars24 had raised a $450 million round from DST, Falcon Edge, SoftBank, and Tencent at a valuation of around $1.84 billion.
According to the company records, the Gurugram-based startup had sold 4,900 vehicles in the first eight months of 2020. The company is currently present across ten markets -Delhi, Gurgram, Noida, Bangalore, Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Pune, Chennai, Hyderabad and Kolkata. Spinny is looking to expand to 20-25 cities by this year-end, it said.
How Spinny changed the game in the swarming used car space
Founded in 2015 by Niraj Singh, Spinny was started with a managed classifieds approach. However, the company pivoted in 2017 to become a full-stack platform to weed out mistrust. Under the new focus, the company started owning every piece of experience: fixing all glitches, post-sales service and finance.
The pivot worked for Spinny and the company differentiated itself from CarDekho and Cars24. Investors also started to build trust in the company’s new model and in May 2019, it raised a $13.2 million Series A round. Then in February 2020, the company closed its $43.7 million series B round.
During the last six months of 2021, the company had raised $165 million across two rounds led by Tiger Global and General Catalyst. A year ago, it also acquired Mumbai-based used car marketplace Truebil.
