5miles Raises $30M In Fight Against Craigslist

Despite all the advances that have been made surrounding on-demand deliveries and last-mile fulfillment, customers who want to search their own neighborhoods for goods their peers don’t want are still stuck with newspaper classifieds or the user-agnostic Craigslist.

With an extra $30 million in funding, 5miles wants to become the next best thing in shopping the classifieds.

5miles announced the end of the Series B+ funding round Tuesday (Jan. 26). Blue Lake, IDG, Morningside and SIG-China all participated in the round, though 5miles CFO Garwin Chan explained that recent interest from major market players, like Alibaba and eBay, shows that the company is ready to take the next step.

“We can’t imagine a better way of celebrating our first anniversary than with renewed confidence and support from our investors,” Chan said in a statement. “We’re proud of the operation we’ve created and especially grateful for the loyal, growing base of buyers and sellers from all over the country who’ve been able to connect. We are excited to see them successfully transact with one another through our marketplace.”

5miles runs its U.S. headquarters out of Dallas, which makes that city and Houston its two primary bases of operation. However, Founder Lucas Lu told TechCrunch that 5miles has already soft-launched in 15 other U.S. cities, including Los Angeles, New York and Boston.

Now that the logistical work seems to be running smoothly for 5miles’ imminent expansion, ironing out the kinks that have driven users away from Craigslist might be next on the docket. It was no secret that the original digital classifieds section presented its fair share of fraud and unsafe interactions between sellers and buyers, but Lu says that 5miles is working on a machine algorithm to make the vetting process much more reliable.

“The key is that, in the beginning, we manually do a lot of things, but right now, we have engineers making a program that is leaning using AI that will be able to do some of this by machine learning,” Lu told TechCrunch.