Hillhouse leads Series B for India auto portal CarDekho

Hong Kong hedge fund Tybourne Capital and Sequoia Capital also participated in the financing, which values CarDekho at $300 million. Sequoia was the sole investor in the company's Series A round in November 2013, committing over $15 million for a 20% stake.

CarDekho was founded in March 2008 as a source of news and reviews of automobiles, allowing users to search different models by date of launch, brand name, body type, price and popularity. It also serves as a platform through which individuals and dealers can sell new and used vehicles, take out insurance, secure purchase loans and participate in discussions.

A total of 34 million unique visitors have came to the site in the first four years, with 25 million in 2012 alone. CarDekho now claims to draw nearly 11 million visits per month from 7.5 million unique visitors. Revenue has grown threefold since 2013 and lead generation is doubling year-on-year. The new capital will go towards improving technology and services as well as brand building and marketing.

CarDekho and Gaadi.com - which GirnarSoft acquired from Naspers last year - are said to be the largest players in India's online auto classifieds space by revenue and traffic.

GirnarSoft was set up in 2007 by brothers Amit and Anurag Jain, both alumni of the Indian Institute of Technology - Delhi, as an outsourced product developer. They subsequently launched CarDekho - the company's flagship portal - and also run the likes of BikeDekho, BillGuru, TutorCircle and MobileDekho. GirnarSoft employs over 500 people across 11 major Indian cities.

"We see tremendous growth opportunities in the online automobile classified market in India. CarDekho, as the clear leading player in this space, is the best positioned to take advantage of this market," David Rhee, a partner at Hillhouse, said in a statement. "We are in the early stages of the development of the auto industry and its transition to online."

Rhee - who leads international investments for Hillhouse, a China-based but Asia-focused group with investments totaling $18 billion - will join the GirnarSoft board. The firm was recently reported to have raised a $2 billion fund to deploy in global private equity deals.

Tybourne Capital is led by Eashwar Krishnan and has $3 billion in assets under management. It has a particular focus on technology, media and internet companies, and has invested in companies such as Snapdeal, Uber, Amazon, Autohome, Naspers, Tencent Holdings and Palantir.

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• Topics
• Expansion
• South Asia
• Technology
• Consumer
• automobiles
• Hillhouse Capital Management
• India
• TMT
• Consumer
• Growth capital
• Sequoia Capital