Droom, the automobile marketplace recently raised a Series D funding round of $30 million with Toyota Tsusho Corporation (TTC), daughter company of Toyota Group Corporation, leading the investment round. Existing investor Digital Garage and four additional new investors from Hong Kong also participated in the funding round.
The deal is a memorandum of understanding with TTC to expand operations in overseas market, with Toyota’s inventory as primary asset for expansion. This is the fifth round of funding that Droom is benefitting from, amounting to a total of $95 Mn since its founding. The company is set for its IPO by 2019.
The previous round of funding of Droom happened in July 2017 when it raised $20 Mn from Digital Garage and others. In June 2016, it raised $25 Mn from Beenext and Digital Garage.
Droom saw the day in April 2014 with founders Sandeep Aggarwal and Rishab Malik. It aims at enabling customers to buy and sell new or old vehicles and caters all four business models, more precisely, business-to-business (B2B), business-to-customer (B2C), customer-to-customer (C2C) and customer-to-business (C2B).
The company is headquartered in Gurugram and claims to hold 65% of the automobile marketplace market segment. The startup also expanded its portfolio to include electric vehicles as well. The CEO of the company, Sandeep Aggarwal previously announced its plans to integrate the Southeast Asian market and its plan to integrate NASDAQ by 2019.
Additionally, Droom claims to have a Gross Merchandise Volume (GMV) of $650 million and operations in over 500 cities of India.
Moreover, the platform assists automobile dealers in increasing their customer base while also providing vehicle checks thanks to the company’s advanced data science algorithms. Dealers have to pay an annual subscription fee to use the platform and the platform also wants to introduce automobile credit intended to consumers. The startup also wishes generate revenues from its Orange Book Value feature, which provides the fair price of bikes and cars sold on the platform.
The platform also provides services such as History which keep a record of over 200 million vehicle records, Discovery which provides several pre-buying tools and Credit which is a marketplace for vehicles available for rent.
Droom is a direct competitor to other startups in the same market segment such as Cartisan, Bumper, Pitshop, etc…