Social Commerce Startup Carousell Secures $50M For Expansion

Mobile marketplace Carousell is aiming to expand its social commerce service across Asia by attaining a $50 million Series B funding round.

The Singapore-based company supports a peer-to-peer marketplace on mobile devices where users can buy and sell goods and is looking to use its expansion to become a major eCommerce player in Southeast Asia, multiple sources told TechCrunch late last week.

While Carousell has yet to confirm the reports, it has reportedly been drumming up interest from investors over the past month.

The company’s Series A funding round, which took place in Nov. 2014 and was led by Sequoia, brought in $6 million and followed a seed investment round of $800,000 led by Japanese eCommerce player Rakuten in 2013.

For now, Carousell’s service can be accessed via iOS and Android apps, as well as its website in Singapore, Indonesia and Taiwan, but an expansion further into the Asia-Pacific region could see it moving to Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines.

“In Taiwan, users are already used to buying peer-to-peer on existing desktop platforms, but there is still a gap in mobile. We took a trip there recently and realized we need to make a move immediately. Malaysia is similar, and it is just across the border from us,” Carousell Cofounder and CEO Siu Rui Quek said in an interview with TechCrunch last year. “We made the decision with a few markets, but we also have global ambitions. I would say that in the larger APAC region, markets that could be interesting are Australia, New Zealand and even Hong Kong.”