Cars24 announced that it has raised $450 million in equity and debt round from SoftBank, Tencent, DST Global, Falcon Edge’s Alpha Wave Incubation and others. According to the company, several individuals including DoorDash chief executive Tony Xu, US hedge fund billionaire Dan Och, Ritesh Agarwal and Yashish Dahiya have also participated in the round.
The fresh funding takes Cars24’s valuation close to $2 billion. The company became the first unicorn from the used car space in November 2020.
Besides buying cars on behalf of dealers, Cars24 has also expanded its operations into selling to retail customers. India, Middle East, Australia and the UK are the key markets for Cars24.
In the technology space, Cars24 competes with the likes of CarDekho, Spinny and Droom and remotely with Mahindra First Choice and Maruti True value.
Ahead of the new funding round, the Vikram Chopra-led company facilitated partial exits to its early backers and two separate secondary deals. MPGI Holdings, Asia Venture Group and Siegfried Trust and its four co-founders had offloaded $20 million worth shares across two secondary deals since December.
During the secondary round, the co-founders of Cars24 received bonus shares worth $36 million from the company.
This is SoftBank’s eighth investment in India in the ongoing calendar year. The Japan-based investor had recently co-led a $650 million round in edtech company Eruditus. Prior to that, it had invested in b2b e-commerce platform OfBusiness, foodtech company Swiggy, e-commerce marketplace Flipkart, social commerce platform Meesho, new age banking tech company Zeta and digital adoption solutions provider Whatfix.
