E-commerce industry has attracted a lot of practitioners and investors to indulge in the industry. Started from Amazon and E-Bay, now there are countless e-commerce companies operating around the world. In Southeast Asia, Carousell is one of the earliest and biggest companies in the industry.
Big funding rounds for Carousell
The Singapore-based company was founded in August 2012. Carousell offers a marketplace for consumers to buy and sell goods. It uses C2C or customer to customer model. Where customers can buy and sell not only new but also secondhand goods. It is one of the few e-commerce that includes cars in its platform.
The first massive funding it successfully held was in 2014, led by Sequoia Capital India. The company invested $6 million to Carousell. Two years laer, the Japanese company Rakuten with 500 other startups led its Series B funding. The company gained another $35 billion. The Series C in 2018, led by Rakuten and 5 other companies is the biggest funding with total of $85 million.
Now Carousell is available not only in Sing
apore but also 19 other countries in Southeast Asia and Australia. Queck Siu Rui, Lucas Ngoo, and Marcus Tan, co-founders of the company aimed to make Carousell lead the Southeast Asian Market.
Rough road for the massive goal
It would not be easy, though. Currently Shopee, its’ competitor, is holding a bigger portion of the market. Shopee has gained $1.5 billion funding, almost ten times the total of Carousell funding. Customers also prefers Shopee, making it the number one downloaded e-commerce app in Playstore.
Carousell has also had to deal with some problems around fake sellers. The Singapore Police Force reported that the company is responsible to 70% e-commerce scam in 2018. Some of the scams even included harassment from the scammers.
If Carousell really wants to lead the Southeast Asian market, it really should start to build a better system to minimize frauds. The $56 million funding from OLX Group in its most recent Corporate Round funding should be enough for it.