The $162-million investment

Danggeun Market is the startup behind the Korean community’s secondhand trading app Karrot. In Korean, “danggeun” means “carrot”. This startup has successfully raised $162 million in a Series D funding round. Thanks to that, the startup has achieved a valuation of $2.7 billion. The capital has turned Danggeun into Asia’s new unicorn. This unicorn has a total raised capital of 205 million USD to date. This Series D round is led by DST Global. Aspex Management, Reverent Partners, Goodwater Capital, Altos Ventures, SoftBank Ventures Asia, Kakao Ventures, Strong Ventures, Capstone Partners also participated in the funding round. The new capital will expand Danggeun’s business. This unicorn will invest in R&D, artificial intelligence, and machine learning technology.

Danggeun will look for areas with high population density abroad. This unicorn will strengthen the local commerce capacity with Danggeun Pay, Karrot Pay app being launched this year. Co-Founder & Co-CEO Gary Kim said, “Danggeun will expand overseas in the next two years. In Korea, we will diversify our business, becoming a super app.” Users can access everything through this platform. Unicorn will also expand its online to offline service for Korean SMBs. “We are in no hurry to IPO at this stage. We are now able to raise enough capital in the private market. We will consider listing shares after generating stable profit.”

About the secondhand goods selling unicorn

Gary Kim and Paul Kim founded this secondhand goods selling unicorn in 2015. The name Danggeun Market has a friendly meaning of “neighborhood market”. Danggeun released the global version of the Karrot community app in the UK in November 2019. This Unicorn is running the app in 72 local communities in the UK, USA, Canada, Japan. The number of users has exceeded 21 million registrations. In which, Korea has 20.92 million registered households. Danggeun Market’s growth has reached more than 300% year-on-year since 2018. In 2019, the app reached 1.8 million monthly regular users. The number increases to 4.8 million people in 2020, and 14.2 million people in 2021. Danggeun Market users spend an average of 2 hours and 2 minutes per month on this app.

The next funding round depends on the growth of Danggeun’s global expansion. If the global business is good, Karrot will attract more users. Eventually, Danggeun will raise another capital. “Danggeun didn’t choose any specific countries. We changed our foreign penetration strategy with Karrot’s global app. Then we tracked the countries showing organic growth. We’ll narrow down the specific countries and citíe to focus on development,” Mr. Kim shared. 

Source of information is TechCrunch.