Used car retailing startup Spinny buys rival Truebil

Online car retailing platform provider Spinny on Thursday said it has acquired Mumbai-based rival startup Truebil to offer a full-stack retail platform for cars.

Spinny and Truebil declined to provide the financial details of the transaction.

"... But given Spinny is still in its early days, we will let the Truebil platform keep operating as an independent brand for now. We will reassess merging within the Spinny brand umbrella after some time,” Spinny's founder and CEO Niraj Singh said in a statement.

Spinny is owned by Yellow Drive Technologies. 

The deal is a “fire sale” bereft of positive investors returns, an Entrackr report said, citing an anonymous source. Paix Technology-run Truebil’s investors include venture capital firms KAE Capital, Kalaari Capital, Inventus Capital Partners, Shunwei Capital, among others.

The startup has raised a total of $24 million in funding till date.

Truebil was founded in 2015 by former Housing.com employees Suraj Kalwani, Ravi Chirania, Shubh Bansal, Rakesh Raman and Shanu Vivek, along with former Fab.com executive Ritesh Pandey and former Rio Tinto engineer Himanshu Singhal.

It operates a consumer to consumer (C2C) managed used car marketplace, and a full-stack direct retail programme. The company has presence across Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Delhi NCR (national capital region). It clocked annual sales of over Rs 250 crore prior to the Covid-19 outbreak, the statement added.

Indian used car market is witnessing consolidation and rapid growth among players due to the changing personal transport preferences in light of the pandemic, according to Spinny

With services across Delhi NCR, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Pune, Spinny claims to have seen significant tailwind in its business “post-Covid-19 outbreak.” 

Also founded in 2015, Spinny initially started with the C2C managed marketplace model and went on to pivot to its current full-stack platform model, after realizing the need to control the entire value chain, in 2017, it said.

“Other peers like Cars24, CarDekho, OLX, etc. provide their services mostly in the unorganized classifieds and dealer ecosystems side of the market,” Spinny added.

The startup last raised a capital of about $44 million in a Series B round of funding, led by Nandan Nilekani's venture fund The Fundamentum Partnership. In terms of its future plans, Spinny aims to further expand into its existing markets and enter new markets soon, it said, without divulging a timeline.