Last week online car sales and valuation service CarPrice.ru received $2 million in seed investment. The principal investors were Almaz Capital, Fastlane Ventures, e.ventures along with several other Russian and foreign funds.
The company was founded very recently, in June of this year, by Edward Gurinovich, Oskar Hartmann, Alexander Danilov and Artem Bolshakov.
Hartmann is a co-founder of Fastlane Ventures. The young German businessman, who speaks Russian fluently, is also behind the KupiVIP group, which includes major fashion e-commerce sites.
CarPrice offers car owners free preliminary valuations based on their vehicle’s registration year, model, mileage etc, on the basis of which further free diagnostics can be carried out in order to establish the vehicle’s definitive value. If the vehicle owner wishes, they can sell their car through the site in just half an hour.
The company works through an auction model: once it has bought a vehicle from the owner it is sold to the dealer offering the highest bid, thus enabling the site to offer its customers the best possible prices. According to CarPrice the company’s valuation service has been used by over 160,000 people in the four months since its launch.
The new investment will go towards broadening the site’s network of dealers in Moscow, St Petersburg and other Russian cities. It currently has a network of distributors in all of the country’s major regions, made up of over 400 dealers.
