South Korea-based online thrift marketplace Danggeun Market has reportedly raised USD 162 million in a Series D round led by DST Global, pulling the company’s valuation to USD 2.7 billion.

The round also saw contributions from existing investors like Capstone Partners, Strong Ventures, Kakao Ventures, SoftBank Ventures Asia, Altos Ventures, Goodwater Capital, with additional participation from Reverent Partners, and Aspex Management.

The secondhand marketplace disruptor has earned the title of a unicorn with the latest funding, raising a total of USD 205 million to date. The company plans to improve its standing in local e-commerce with the launch of Danggeun Pay or Karrot Pay this year. Danggeun's platform Karrot currently enables about 300,000 local SMB partners to go digital by offering an offline to online (O2O) solution.

For the record, Paul Kim and Gary Kim launched Danggeun Market in 2015, which is short for "the market in your neighborhood.” Consumers can access everything from fresh local food delivery to essential services such as cleaning, real estate brokerage, education, and used vehicles in their vicinities through this platform.

The funds raised will be utilized to expand globally, diversify the company's operations, invest in advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence technology, and hire new team members, sources cited. In this context, Gary Kim, co-CEO and co-founder, mentioned that after closing this Series D round, they intend to focus on further overseas market expansion over the next two years.

John Lindfors, the managing partner at DST Investment Management, expressed that Danggeun Market has established overwhelming dominance in the Korean C2C business. The thrift store has demonstrated its potential as the hyperlocal super app, with distinctive user behavior from location-based communities, he added.

Knowledgeable sources cited that in 2019, the company had 1.8 million monthly active users (MAUs), 4.8 million MAUs in 2020, and 14.2 million MAUs in 2021, rising at a rate of 3x each year over the previous three years. It now claims to have over 21 million registered users and has achieved y-o-y growth of over 300% since 2018.

Source Credit –

https://techcrunch.com/2021/08/17/south-korean-online-secondhand-marketplace-danggeun-market-raises-162m-at-a-2-7b-valuation/