Through its $10m fund, which it raised earlier this year to invest in start-ups from Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia, Rakuten has led a SGD$1m ($800,00) seed round in Carousell, a Singapore consumer-to-consumer second-hand marketplace app for iOS and Android. Other investors that participated include Golden Gate Ventures, 500 Startups, and entrepreneurs and angel investors Danny Oei Wirianto and Darius Cheung. The start-up, which was established in 2012, will use its funding to expand into Indonesia and Malaysia.
The app allows users to buy and sell their new and used merchandise by taking a photo of the product you want to sell and upload in 30 seconds. The team says that it is driven by the image of a sustainable world where people intuitively sell items instead of letting them go to waste idling, and where people save money buying second-hand items first.
The idea came about from the team’s frustration with how tedious it is to sell something on existing marketplaces and classifieds sites. The app places an emphasis on beautiful photos, and is “location-aware to make second-hand shopping serendipitous”.
According to a report by online news site, e27, Carousell claims that on average, a user opens the app 10 times a day and spends about 25 minutes on it daily. In comparison, a Facebook user opens the app 14 times a day and uses it for 30 minutes daily. There are over a million listings in the Carousell marketplace, and over 20% of that end up getting purchased.
Quek Siu Rui, Co-founder, Carousell, who oversees product and customer support, told media that its target users are women between 16 to 34.As the app scales up, Riu said that the business will add in-app payment options to enable credit card transactions (buyers and sellers currently arrange payment and delivery details through the app’s private chat feature). Carousell is looking at several monetization strategies, including charging for premium features such as additional payment options and taking transaction fees.
Riu said that the Rakuten investment was not strategic to the business.