Spotawheel, a startup working in Greece and Poland with an automobile dealership version like Carvana in the U.S., has picked up €5 million in new funding. Backing the web-used vehicle dealership is Venture Friends, which led the round, with participation from Velocity Partners and unnamed “strategic” buyers. The investment involves fairness and debt financing because a part of Spotawheel’s commercial enterprise includes purchasing used motors in advance. It brings overall raised by the Athens-situated startup to €8 million considering launching in 2016.
“Used motors are certainly one of the largest markets in value global developing at a 5-7% fee yearly, working nevertheless by and large offline in a notoriously non-transparent way,” says Charis Arvanitis, Spotawheel co-founder, and CEO. This sees capacity buyers fear shopping for a “lemon,” coupled with over-complex strategies, hidden expenses, and fragmented delivery. The latter largely includes private sellers via classified ads and conventional offline used automobile dealerships.
“The loss of centralized manage on the enterprise’s highly fragmented seller structure had averted any meaningful innovation over the past twenty years when the everyday online advertisements emerged,” says Arvanitis. “That problem is even greater evidence in Europe, in which car trade flows among nations make it a lot harder to manipulate high-quality and trace automobile records.”
To deal with this, Spotawheel offers an internet B2C platform for used motors that Arvanitis says has redesigned the buy-sell process from scratch to create a “frictionless” and trusted shopping for revel in. The idea is to bring e-commerce tiers of convenience and protection to purchasing a used automobile. “Customers can choose in for a check pressure or have the car added countrywide underneath a 7-day go back policy, at the same time as playing as much as five years of restrained assurance, the biggest in Europe,” he says.
This is underpinned by using Spotawheel’s “predictive analytics,” masking the situation and expected screw-ups on an in-step automobile foundation. In addition, Arvanitis explains Spotawheel’s vehicle sourcing version combines debt-financed and marketplace practices, allowing the startup to supply quality motors from private owners and B2B resellers across Europe. It involves deploying working capital purchasing motors in advance or via a fee-basis settlement.