NLVC leads Series A for China online car retailer
Northern Light Venture Capital (NLVC) has led a Series A round of funding for Maihaoche.com, a Chinese automotive e-commerce platform that specializes in parallel imports.
The investment amounts to hundreds of millions of renminbi. Innovation Works has also participated in the round.
Hangzhou-based Maihaoche.com was founded last July by a group of former employees of Alibaba Group. The start-up raised $3 million from Innovation Works a few months after it launched. The online platform sells imported automotive brands, such as Audi, BMW and Porsche, in China without the companies' consent.
Parallel imports accounts for a small portion of the entire automotive market in China but this segment is still worth tens of billions of renminbi each year, Yanzhu Li, the founder and CEO of Maihaoche, told local media.
China's auto-related e-commerce vertical has attracted considerable investor interest. Earlier this year, online retailer JD.com and its investor Tencent Holdings formed a strategic partnership with Bitauto, committing $1.55 billion to the auto e-commerce operator and its investment unit.
In March, KKR teamed up with search giant Baidu and US-based hedge fund sponsor Coatue to invest $170 million in Uxin, an online used car auction company best known for B2B platform Youxinpai. The firm was set up by former Bitauto executives in 2011 and raised $260 million from Warburg Pincus and Tiger Global Management last year.
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