Mumbai-based Incredible Technologies Pvt Ltd that runs a used vehicles marketplace under CredR has raised $15 million (Rs 100 crore) in Series A round of funding from Eight Roads Ventures (earlier Fidelity Growth Partners India), according to a press release.
As part of the deal, Kabir Narang, managing director at Eight Roads, will join the board of CredR.
The startup will use the funding to scale up its product engineering and marketing and build its market leading product platform across 20 Indian cities, it said.
“The used vehicles marketplace represents a large opportunity globally, and CredR is well positioned to emerge as the leader in this space," Narang said.
Incepted in 2014 by three IIT Bombay alumni—Nikhil Jain, Nittin Mittal and Sumit Chhazed—CredR is an online platform which connects buyers and sellers for buying and selling of pre-owned automobiles.
Prior to founding this venture, Jain, Mittal and Chhazed have also founded couple of more startups. In April, 2013, they started Courseware Eduventures, a technology-focused education company and Enelek Power that was into energy saving solutions in India.
Early this year, CredR raised seed funding from a set of angel investors including serial entrepreneur K Ganesh, Snapdeal co-founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal and Amit Agarwal of Amazon.
“We are focusing on the large used vehicle market with an estimated value of $10 billion. The market is ripe for technology-led disruption that CredR aims to bring in the process of buying and selling pre-owned vehicles,†said Jain.
Eight Roads Ventures, which is part of American financial services conglomerate Fidelity, is an active growth stage investor with positions in over two dozen companies, according to VCCEdge, the data research platform of VCCircle.
Most recently, it invested in Hyderabad-based Celon Laboratories Ltd, a company engaged in manufacturing and supplying raw materials, formulations and active pharmaceutical ingredients.
In another deal in the space, Droom Technology Pvt. Ltd, which runs online marketplace for pre-owned automobiles Droom.in, raised a similar amount in Series A investment from Lightbox and Japanese e-commerce firm Beenos. Droom was launched by Sandeep Aggarwal, who had previously founded online marketplace ShopClues.
There are several players in the business such as Truebil, Zoomo, CarDekho (which acquired Gaadi.com), Carwale and CarTrade in addition to horizontal P2P platforms such as OLX and Quikr.
Recently, Zoomo secured Rs 32 crore (around $5 million) in funding from existing investor SAIF Partners. Truebil had raised $500,000 (RS 3.17 crore) in its first round of funding from seed stage VC fund Kae Capital and angel investor Anupam Mittal in June this year.
