Balderton 
- Portfolio News
- 12 November, 2024
The investment was led by Bessemer Venture Partners as well as existing Carwow investors including Accel, Balderton, Episode 1 & Vitruvian Partners.
The Carwow Group, which includes the Carwow online marketplace Auto Express, evo, Driving Electric and Carbuyer – has raised $52m (£41m) in a new funding round to accelerate its growth across the UK, Germany and Spain. Balderton first led Carwow’s seed round in 2014.
Over 10m customers have used Carwow to help them buy and sell cars since the business’s inception and last year nearly £3bn worth of cars were bought through the platform whilst £1.8bn of cars were listed for sale through its Sell My Car (SMC) service.
This latest investment will be used to supercharge Carwow’s strategic growth plans including further scaling and expanding the SMC service in the UK to attract more customers and source more cars for its dealer partners.
The business saw stellar growth in H1 with revenue increasing by 56% as more consumers move online to change their cars and it will be significantly expanding its product and engineering teams over the next few months to deliver this next phase of growth.
Over the course of the last 3 years, we’ve worked tirelessly to develop our car changing proposition in the UK, giving consumers access to thousands of partners that can help them buy a new car and sell their old one. Our customers love the breadth of choice and convenience of managing every step of their car changing journey online and partners rely on us to help drive sales of new cars and source stock.
Given the phenomenal reaction to our strategic blueprint in the UK, we’re excited to use this new funding to take our proposition to our existing businesses in Germany and Spain. We’ll also continue to invest in new technologies to help our partners seamlessly appraise, buy and collect cars directly from the millions that use Carwow every month
