Toronto-based VarageSale has raised a $34 million Series B, led by Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from iNovia, Real Ventures, Floodgate, and Version One Ventures. This is a follow-on investment in VarageSale by Sequoia, which had previously invested an undisclosed amount July of last year. It was also announced that Jeremy Liew, partner at Lightspeed and Bryan Schreier, partner at Sequoia, will join VarageSale’s board of directors.
“With millions of members and billions of items viewed per month, VarageSale is disrupting the mobile classified space,” said Liew. “But it is what happens outside the app and inside the communities that is really unique about their business.”
Acting like a ‘virtual garage sale’, VarageSale is a listings marketplace organized around micro-communities. The company has indicated that 90% of its traffic comes via mobile, with 50% of VarageSale’s “millions” of users hitting the site every day.
Initially based in Montreal, VarageSale relocated to Toronto in the hopes of tapping into Waterloo’s engineering talent. The company will soon be moving into a new office downtown.
“We’ve grown 400% since this time last year, and we will continue to build the best team possible to meet the expectation of our extremely passionate member base” said Carl Mercier, co-founder and CEO of VarageSale. “Toronto has great local talent pool to help build the team.”
“Now, with this funding from our new partners,” said Tami Zuckerman, co-founder and ‘Chief Mom’ at VarageSale. “We will be able to continue to invest in the happiness of our user communities and our growing team.”
