Carousell, a really interesting Singapore-based social media-meets-Ebay app, has raised $35M in a Series B round from 4 investors, including Tokyo-based Rakuten Ventures as lead investor and US-based 500 Startups, Golden Gate Ventures and Sequoia Capital.
Much as we try to keep our site primarily US-focused, it's just not possible, and we realize this is e-commerce/social media, but by virtue of that, we also consider it fintech (at least kinda sorta). Anyway, if you check out the Carousell site, it's a really interesting premise, with the tagline "Snap to Sell, Chat to Buy for FREE with Carousell Groups". You can join social groups with similar interests, and they claim you can have an item listed for sale within 30 seconds, which is FAR faster and easier than Ebay auction listings. BTW, the image with this story is from their US site. Try as they may, most Asian websites don't quite get the American lexicon down when they translate to English, but we get the idea.
Anyway, the countries they currently serve are primarily Pacific Rim - Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Taiwan, Australia and Hong Kong, but they do also have a US presence. It's also interesting that although they got VC money from Japan, they do not serve that market at present. Anyway, a very interesting "new" e-commerce/social media site.
Total Equity Funding: $41.8M
Most Recent Funding: $35M Series B on August 1, 2016
Read Full Listing at Crunchbase