Droom raises $30 Mn Series D round, eyes $3.5 Bn GMV before IPO

Online automobile marketplace Droom has raised $30 million in Series D round led by Japan's auto major Toyota's investment arm Toyota Tsusho and VC firm Digital Garage.

This is the first ever investment by the Japanese automaker in Indian startup. Besides investment manager Ellison Investments and family offices from China, Hong Kong, and South East Asia also participated in the round.

The Gurugram-based firm will use the fresh capital to develop its machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities to target a significant growth in scale. Besides, a part of the fund will be used to expand into the international market such as Indonesia and Thailand.

The firm has also signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Toyota for the same.

While the marketplace claims to have captured 70 per cent of the online automobile market share in India, we are unable to understand the mind-boggling claim. It essentially means that CarDekho, CarTrade, ZigWheels along with many others have only been able to grab 30 per cent of the segment.

It also claims to generate about $700 million in gross revenue and $15 million in net revenue.

Further, the Sandeep Aggarwal steered company aims to double its gross merchandise value to $1.4bn by end of 2018 and $3.5bn by 2019, reveals the company's press statement.

The aforementioned figure is a good sign for the four-year-old company as its losses mounted to around 254 percent ($7.3 million) in CY17. While it had registered jump of more than 100 percent ($5 million) in revenue, the company expenses surged to 170 percent ($12.4 million) in the same period.

With over 250,000 auto dealers across 500 cities in India and 27.3 million monthly visitors, the company also planning to go public by the end of next year.

Founded in 2014, Droom has so far raised close to $65 million. It offers a wide range of categories from bicycle to planes. Besides the platform provides other automobile services such as warranty, RSA, insurance, and auto loan.

It claims to use advanced technologies like de-facto pricing standard, full circle trust score, among others.

Earlier, Droom had partnered with Mahindra and Hero Electric to bring electric vehicles on its platform. In Oct last year, it also partnered with a fintech lender startup Qbera to offer financing options for buying second-hand or pre-owned cars and bikes on its platform.