Spotawheel, a startup working in Greece and Poland with a automobile dealership mannequin fairly just like Carvana within the U.S., has picked up €5 million in new funding. Backing the net used automobile dealership is Venture Friends, which led the spherical, with participation from Velocity Partners and unnamed “strategic” buyers.
The funding consists of each fairness and debt financing, since a part of Spotawheel’s enterprise consists of buying used automobiles upfront. It brings complete raised by the Athens-headquartered startup to €eight million since launching in 2016.
“Used cars is one of the largest markets in value worldwide growing at a 5-7% rate annually, operating still primarily offline in a notoriously non-transparent way,” says Charis Arvanitis, Spotawheel co-founder and CEO.
This sees potential consumers worry shopping for a “lemon,” coupled with over-complicated processes, hidden-fees, and fragmented provide. The latter is basically a mix of personal sellers through labeled advertisements, and conventional offline used automobile dealerships.
“The lack of centralized control on the industry’s hugely fragmented seller structure, has prevented any meaningful innovation over the past 20 years, when the typical online classified ads emerged,” says Arvanitis. “That problem is even more evident in Europe, where car trade flows between countries make it much harder to control quality and trace cars history”.
To handle this, Spotawheel provides a web based B2C platform for used automobiles that Arvanitis says has redesigned the buy-sell course of from scratch to create a “frictionless” and trusted shopping for expertise. The thought is to convey e-commerce ranges of comfort and safety to buying a used automobile.
“Customers can opt in for a test drive or have the car delivered countrywide under a 7-day return policy, while enjoying up to 5 years of limited warranty, the largest in Europe,” he says. This is underpinned by Spotawheel’s “predictive analytics” protecting the situation and anticipated failures on a per automobile foundation.
In addition, Arvanitis explains Spotawheel’s automobile sourcing mannequin combines each debt-financed and market practices, permitting the startup to supply the most effective automobiles from non-public homeowners and B2B resellers throughout Europe. The consists of deploying working capital buying automobiles upfront or through a commission-basis settlement.
