CredR raises $15M funding, aims to expand to 20 Indian cities
Mumbai-based CredR, the used vehicles marketplace, raised its Series A funding round of USD 15 million by Eight Roads Venture, Fidelity's proprietary investment arm, it announced today. Earlier this year, CredR had raised a seed round from the likes of Rohit Bansal, Kunal Bahl, K Ganesh, and Amit Agarwal.
With this new round of funding, the CredR team is looking to scale up its marketing and product engineering efforts. The team also intends to expand to 20 cities across the country. Kabir Narang, Managing Director at Fidelity's investment arm, will be joining the CredR board.
"We started with selling four vehicles in a week. Today, we are selling close to 100 vehicles in a day," said Sumit Chhazed, Co-founder of CredR. Born out of a personal experience, CredR was started by IIT Mumbai and Stanford alumni Sumit Chhazed, Nikhil Jain, Nittin Mittal, and Shiv Agarwal.
Nikhil says that the used vehicle market is estimated at USD 10 billion and the market now is perfect for technology-led disruption. Sumit added that the team is looking to transform the experience of buying and selling used bikes in India. He said that the team currently aims to bring the experience of first-hand vehicle to buying pre-owned vehicles.
CredR, according to Kabir, is one of the fastest growing startups in the segment. He says that a marketplace for used vehicles represents a huge opportunity and CredR is positioned to emerge as the leader in this segment.
Sumit said that the team is now coming up with a dynamic pricing algorithm. The marketplace already has a CredR score ranging from zero to five in place. This new algorithm will relate itself to the score. "This makes it easier for the buyer to pick a bike. He/she need not worry too much about thinking about the cost, they can easily figure the price of the bike on the basis of its score," added Sumit.
This algorithm will have several factors like conditions of the bike, seasonality, and demand-driven data. This ensures that the price of a vehicle will have the fairest value as given per market standards. The team will also be working on launching their app known as CredR Connect, where the sellers can check the sales, transactions, and create schedules for themselves.
The space for used vehicles is believed to be 1.3 times more than the new cars market. Today, the market is more open to an idea of used vehicles, as reports suggest that vehicles today are better managed and maintained than they were earlier. The market for used vehicles is believed to grow at 20 per cent CAGR by 2017.