British Used Car Website Carzam Nets Almost $150M in Funding

Carzam, the used car site, has raked in £112 million toward its business to keep selling used cars, a report from The Telegraph says.

According to chief executive Kirk O’Callaghan, the funding will let the company keep on improving tech and “continue to grow our customer and remarketing services in preparation to increase our unit numbers exponentially.”

The report says Carzam has sold around 13,500 used cars through its site, with around £150 million brought in in the first year of trading.

According to O’Callaghan, there have been changes in the industry – customers don’t want to lock themselves into a hard sell, and want instead to look into more browsing options from home, with less pressure.

There’s also been the shortage of new vehicles due to the global supply chain issues – including a lack of microchips. That has also helped households turn more to the pre-owned market, and the glut of savings from the quarantine period has added to families’ ability to afford such things.

The report quotes data from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Trades that says there were around 5.9 million used cars sold in the U.K. in the first nine months of this year. This constitutes almost a sixth of a jump from the previous year.

With the used car market doing well, fellow retailer Carvana has said its partnership with Hertz would be able to aid the car company in offering more tech and logistics methods to sell used vehicles.

Read more: Carvana Says Partnerships Provide New Horizontal, Vertical Opportunities

“These partnerships are each very exciting,” Carvana CEO Ernie Garcia said during the call. “Each has excellent underlying fundamentals and therefore excellent potential, but they’re also exciting because of what they represent. As we continue building the Carvana platform to deliver exceptional customer experiences and to handle the constantly increasing scale, our horizontal and vertical opportunities continue to increase.”