Volvo Cars Tech Fund invests in online marketplace carwow

Volvo Cars Tech Fund takes a strategic minority investment in online marketplace carwow

Volvo Cars has taken a strategic minority stake in carwow through the Volvo Cars Tech Fund, its venture capital arm. carwow are a leading online marketplace for buying and selling cars.

Currently carwow is the largest web platform for new car sales in the UK, Germany and Spain, together with large a large social media following (facebook 827k followers; twitter 50k followers; Instagram 1.1m followers; youtube 7m followers). In terms of selling new cars, CarsVansandBikes.com is a contender and has recently launched a service for all franchised dealers where they can advertise all their brand new or pre-registered vehicle stock up to end of 2022 completely free of charge.

The investment will allow Volvo to gain insight into the carwow online sales channels which will prove invaluable to the drive towards direct sales on new vehicles online together with a much closer relationship with the customer.

The Volvo Cars investment, which is undisclosed, comes hot on the heels of £17.2m in new investment in and earlier investment round in March this year. At that round carwow existing investors including Vitruvian, Balderton and Accel, provided the majority of the equity investment alongside Hercules Capital which provided a £40m debt capital facility in December 2021.