Motorway, a UK platform where professional vehicle dealers may bid in an auction for privately owned cars for sale, only garnered $67.7 million in a Series B round in June, index Ventures and ICONIQ Development, a major Silicon Valley technology growth investment group, led a $190 million Series C capital round. The round included existing investors Latitude, Unbound, and BMW I Ventures. The company presently has a market capitalization of more than $1 billion.
The impact of the COVID epidemic on supply chains is one of the reasons. Because of a shortage of computer chips and other vital equipment from China, the price of used automobiles has risen dramatically.
Consumers may sell their automobile on Motorway using a smartphone app that employs computer vision to analyze the vehicle’s condition. Professional vehicle dealers then bid on the cars in a daily online auction, with the successful dealer picking up the car free within 24 hours. Dealers and auto owners are increasingly looking to buy and sell cars online since it is a “contactless” procedure. Motorway claims it now has a network of 4,000 professional vehicle dealers utilizing the platform and those third-quarter revenues increased by 300 percent to $411 million from $105 million last year. Since its start, Motorway has sold over 100,000 used automobiles, with over 8,000 cars sold each month and over $2 billion in predicted completed sales over the next year.
James Wilson, the previous director of Amazon UK is Marketplace Fulfillment, been appointed as the company’s chief operational officer. “8,000 car sales a month is still less than one percent of UK used car sales – so there’s a big possibility ahead,” said Tom Leathes, CEO of Motorway. “Since joining the board, following our initial investment in June, I have seen personally how rapidly Motorway is developing and how nimble the team is in scaling the business to accommodate this phenomenal growth,” said Danny Rimer, partner at Index Ventures.
“The used vehicle market’s transition online is only accelerating,” said Yoonkee Sull, a partner at ICONIQ Growth. “We believe Motorway is giving the greatest customer experience and the most unique supply to dealers in the United Kingdom.”
Since Leathes, Harry Jones, and Alex Buttle launched the company in 2017, Motorway has raised a total of $273 million. “There’s no relationship with BMW specifically,” Leathes said in a phone interview, “but they are automotive specialists, so they contribute quite a bit of expertise to the larger industry and trends that are happening.” Along with Latitude and Unbound, they were a component of the B.” “What sets Motorway apart from many of our rivals is that we are not a store.” We do not have any merchandise on hand. We are a marketplace, after all. As a result, we’ll be able to scale up considerably more quickly,” he explained.
