KTB leads round for Chinese EV trading platform

The company claims this is its third round of funding since inception last year. Red Avenue New Materials, a locally listed corporate, and several institutional investors committed around RMB100 million ($15 million) across the previous two rounds.

The company was established as a unit under Shenma Finance, an online platform that provides vehicle financing in rural areas. The parent has raised more than RMB300 million from the likes of domestic financial technology player Tongbanjie Group, China Growth Capital, Frees Fund, and Hina Group.

Shenma Chuxing mainly serves dealers in tier-three to tier-six cities, covering areas such as supply chain management, software-as-a-service, and financial services. It wants to help dealers upgrade their traditional sales outlets to more advanced new retail platforms. The company also has self-operated offline stores in 201 cities that have so far sold 20,000 vehicles.

“Shenma has a profound understanding of the new energy car market and knows how to combine online and offline operations in this domain. We are bullish on the future of the company and China’s new energy vehicle market in the lower tier cities,” said Amy Yeh, a managing director at KTB.

China is one of the largest markets globally for EVs and hybrid cars with several well-funded start-ups including Xpeng Motors, CHJ Automotive, WM Motor Technology, US-listed Nio, and Skio Matrix. These companies are consuming ever larger sums of capital as they have yet to make a profit but are investing in heavily in development to try and stay ahead of the competition.

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• Topics
• Greater China
• Early-stage
• Consumer
• Technology
• Frees Fund
• China
• automobiles
• KTB Securities