Daily Briefing: Automotive marketplace Carro raises $124.6m in Series B round; Belmont Road GCB relaunched for sale at lower price of $40.8m

And Foodpanda is setting up its SEA headquarters in Singapore.

From PropertyGuru:

After failing to sell at an auction, a Good Class Bungalow (GCB) at 80 Belmont Road has been re-launched for sale through private treaty, with the guide price lowered to $40.8m.The property, which was owned by The Stratech Group’s Chew family, was put up for sale via an auction on 23 July with a guide price of $42m.

A Knight Frank spokesman said that last month’s auction had a $40.5m opening price. Whilst there were 150 attendees, no bids were placed then.

“But after the auction, a few offers have been made and are now undergoing private negotiations,” noted the spokesman.

It is a mortgagee sale, or one in which a bank forecloses a property after its owner defaults on the mortgage, and then puts the property up for sale to recover the debt.

Read more here.

From DealStreetAsia:

Carro, a Singapore-based automotive marketplace, has raised $124.64m (US$90m) in a Series B funding round from SoftBank Ventures Asia, EDBI and other investors.

According to a statement, Carro raised an additional $41.53m (US$30m) for the oversubscribed round after securing $60 million in May last year. The $41.54m was contributed by SoftBank Ventures Asia, EDBI, Dietrich Foundation and NCORE Ventures. The other investors from its previous $83.1m (US$60m) tranche include Hanwha Asset Management, Insignia Ventures, B Capital Group, Singtel Innov8, Golden Gate Ventures and Alpha JWC.

Carro added that the fresh capital will be used to acquire Jualo.com, an C2C marketplace platform in Indonesia. Jualo helps users trade new and used goods in over 300 categories ranging from cars, motorcycles, property, fashion, electronics; it also posts job adverts.

According to the startup, it has over 4 million users a month and facilitates transactions worth over $1.38b ($1b) in 2018. Its goods are traded across all 34 of Indonesia’s provinces.

Read more here.

From DealStreetAsia:

Food delivery startup Foodpanda announced on Monday that it will make Singapore its headquarters in Asia and spruce up recruitment as it looks to expand its business in the region. 

A subsidiary of Germany’s food delivery startup Delivery Hero, Foodpanda will focus on developing its technology in the city-state. The company plans to work on enhancing its user interface, while also adding a variety of food choices, serving as many as eight markets in Southeast Asia.

The region has huge potential considering Foodpanda recorded a whopping growth in order by 114.8%t in the second quarter of this year, well ahead of other markets such as EMEA (59.7%), the US (43.8%), and Europe (42.1%).

The startup, that celebrated its seventh anniversary in Singapore, will be hiring more than 500 experts for its product and engineering teams. In addition, it also plans to recruit another 100 engineers over the next 3 months.

Read more here.