Gurugram based online full-stack pre-owned car retailing platform Spinny has acquired Truebil for an undisclosed sum. This deal will mark one of the first amalgamations in the used car retailing segment where Spinny appears to pave the way.
The acquisition comes at a time when the used car market has gained momentum due to a change in personal transport preferences due to Covid pandemic.
In the year 2015, Niraj Singh, Mohit Gupta and Ramanshu Mahaur found Spinny as a technology-enabled full-stack pre-owned car platform that uses the online-to-offline(O2O) model to help customers discover cars online on Spinny’s website.
In March 2020, Spinny announced the completion of a $43 Mn Series B round led by Nandan Nilekani’s venture fund (The Fundamentum Partnership). The round saw participation from existing investors Accel and SAIF Partners.
Accel and SAIF Partners had co-led the company’s $13 Mn Series A round in April 2019. With this acquisition, Spinny became the only used car start-up in India which follows a full-stack retail platform model and operates on the organised side of the market.
Truebil was founded by Suraj Kalwani, Himanshu Singhal, Rakesh Raman, Ravi Chirania, Ritesh Pandey, Shanu Vivek, and Shubh Bansal in 2015 as an omnichannel marketplace for pre-owned cars.
It operated a C2C managed used car marketplace along with a full-stack direct retail program as Truebil Direct across Mumbai, Bangalore, and Delhi (NCR)clocking INR 250 Cr+ in annual sales before the Covid outbreak. The company had raised close to $24 Mn in 5 years, including $ 4 Mn in debt funding from investors such as Kalaari Capital, Inventus Capital, Kae, Shunwei Capital among others.
Truebil Co-founder and CEO Suraj Kalwani talking about the amalgamation said that, “We realised that by augmenting each other’s capabilities, we could accelerate towards building the country’s largest and the most trusted used car brand.”
Other major online used car marketplaces in India are Cars24, CarDekho, Droom, Quikr, Olx, Mahindra First Choice Wheels, among others. Industry trends suggest that the used car segment is poised for growth owing to the Covid-19 crisis, with consumers preferring to use their own transportation.