Carsnip, the intelligent car search engine, was able to raise a guaranteed $1 million in investment ahead of its imminent launch with well-known UK High Street brands. The next round of investment, expected to total a further $5 million, will enable Carsnip to build out tools to better connect consumers with car dealers, improve its natural search so anyone can find the car they want not just a car expert and index 20 new European countries. It will also go towards comprehensive UX testing, growing its dealer customer base in the UK and running a pilot across two U.S. States.
The intelligent search platform improves the car buying and selling user experience for everyone through a combination of intelligent crawling to index all cars, powerful ‘natural language’ search and machine learning tools. The platform aims to cut out the middleman and charges dealers to advertise their cars on a pay-per-click basis, rather than charging for individual listings.
Stuart Noad, Co-founder of Carsnip: “Our research shows that middlemen take as many as 4 billion car buyer clicks away from dealers’ websites every year and cost consumers and sellers, on average, £1,200 per car. Carsnip has been built to re-establish the lost connection between buyers and sellers to deliver an awesome user experience. Our long-term vision is to drive down the cost of motoring and this second round of funding helps us get ever closer to that goal.”
The investors behind Carsnip have previously backed the likes of Pinterest, Square and Wave. They include Adrian Aoun (Head of special projects, Google/Alphabet), Alastair Crawford (Founder, i-CD Publishing) and Hank Vigil (Senior vice president of strategy and partnerships, Microsoft).
Alastair Campbell, CEO of Carsnip, stated: “We’re extremely pleased to welcome our new investors onboard. Their support enables us to continue building out our unique car crawl, natural language search and power our online marketplaces in time for a full launch in may. Many industries have already gone through their intelligent search revolution, combining big data and machine learning to optimise user experience (ux). The car industry is next.”
