Renrenche, China’s online used car marketplace, on Monday announced a USD 150 million as a part of a Series D financing, Sina Tech reported. The investors included the existing main strategic investor, Tencent, as well as a handful of new investors including Shunwei Ventures, Ceyuan Ventures, and Redpoint Ventures.
Wang Sicong, the only son of China’s richest man Wang Jianlin, invested in Renrenche via his Prometheus Capital. Other new investors in the round are Hanfor Capital Management Ltd., CMIG Capital, and Xinjun Capital.
Investing in used car sales platforms is one of the ways Tencent – currently Asia’s biggest company by market value – hopes to realize its ambition of the “Internet of Vehicles”.
Last month, Renrenche announced a USD 85 million Series C fundraising round from Tencent.
Founded in 2014, the customer-to-customer car trading platform saw 18,000 cars sold on it during the month of July. That’s approximately one transaction every three minutes, according to Renrenche.
In March, the company announced two plans: One is to expand to 1,000 cities in two years, covering over 90% of used car sales in China.
Another plan is to launch products in markets that are upstream and downstream of the used car market, such as in fields of maintenance service and auto financing.
Li Jian, CEO of Renrenche, was once the youngest ever director of products at Baidu; he then resigned from the post and worked for classified ads website 58.com and Microsoft. After that Li Jian founded the online used car marketplace.
China saw about 10 million used cars traded in 2015, according to the China Automobile Dealers Association. The number is predicted to double by 2020, at which point the market would be worth more than RMB one trillion.
Renrenche has several competitors in China, including Guazi.com, Yiche.com, and Autohome Inc. AllChinaTech in March reported on the USD 204.5 million financing of Guazi.com.
(Top photo from Pixabay.com)