OLX, the Craigslist for the rest of the world, has raised $5 million in funding from from Nexus Capital India. The company raised $13.5 million in Series B funding in April 2008 from General Catalyst Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, Founders Fund and DN Capital, bringing the total funding raised to $28.5 million. OLX raised $13.5 million in Series B funding in April 2008 from the same investors as above, and raised an undisclosed Series A round of $10 million in September 2006 with the same VCs and various angels participating.
While the free classifieds site has trouble competing with Craigslist in the U.S., OLX has a strong user base internationally. With a presence in more than 87 countries in 39 languages, OLX’s popularity lies mainly in Spain, India, Portugal, Mexico, South America, China, and the Philippines.
Fabrice Grinda, founder and CEO of OLX says the new investment will be used to make new acquisitions, implement site improvements, expand globally, and pursue aggressive marketing initiatives. In 2007 OLX has made an investment in Edeng.cn, a Chinese free classifieds site and acquired Mundoanuncio.com, a Craigslist-like classifieds site targeting the Hispanic market, in 2006. Much of its success in the Philippines can be attributed to its white label partnership with Friendster. Its offices are also spread over the globe with 125 employees (OLX has added almost 35 employees since last year) working in New York, Buenos Aires, Beijing, and Moscow.
While OLX may play second fiddle to Craigslist in the U.S., the site prides itself on being a second-generation free classifieds site, complete with Web 2.0 features such as social network widgets, better search capabilities, interactive maps, and mobile functionality. Craigslist has recently been under scrutiny by Attorney Generals over prostitution and the “Craigslist Murder” that have taken place in conjunction with the site. eBay’s Kijiji is also a competitor in the space, but Kijiji has set its sights on catching up to Craigslist in the U.S., even considering a name change.
Having worked in the same industry for a while, I can say that Fabrice is one of the few entrepreneurs who understood the market better than all his competitors. A few Alexa top 5000 sites in 89 countries just speak for themselves. Congrats!
You’ve gotta admit, Fabrice is a good salesman. He could sell ice to Eskimos, and underwear to Bernard Arnault.
I will bet all the readers on Techcrunch a steak sandwich that the current OLX will NEVER generate $23.5 million in revenue in its lifetime.
The VCs who put in more money into this black hole are smoking crack, and it looks like the India VCs are a bit slow in the uptake, not realising that there is a reason why none of the previous investors are investing in this round.
OLC’s business model is … Google Adsense?
Hmm …
According to compete.com their April traffic was 1.5 million. Even assuming a ridiculously high eCPM, given that most of their user base is in low monetisable countries, their monthly revenue from Adsense would be less than US$2000.
If so, the revenue are not even going to cover server costs, and it will take them 979 years to generate enough revenue to equal the amount of VC funding that they raised.
Their only chance in hell is to pull a X.com and buy a Paypal or another great startup company with their VC cash that can dig them out of this hole and make them look like geniuses.
I suggest they start getting on the phone and start calling companies like Threadless.com or Yauba.com and see if they can do the slick sales job on them to convince them to sell their companies to OLX.
hey Pierre !,
First, I guess you can not trust compete.com numbers, especially for sites having traffic from , for instance, Latin american countries.
Second, I have seen with my own eyes low profile classifieds sites having a ecpm of 2 USD , getting only long tail traffic ( nobody knows the sites, very very even unprofessional sites ), getting checks over 30ks a months from those tiny adsense ads,
Acording with a post on Alec Oxenford blog, they got 80 million unique visitors a month, very different from what you got, dude,
However, I have to admit that vc funds always show an incredible hability to make the same mistakes,
I like the site, is quite popular down here in Argentina, Pierre no doy una, if you start with the wrong numbers, you will get a wrong outcome…
chaucha
Mariano.
Pierre:
To see how much traffic we have you can’t just look at olx.com, you need to add the traffic from all our domains: mundoanuncio.com, olx.pt, olx.com.mx, olx.com.br, etc.
I bet we’ll have exceeded $23.5 million in revenues generated from the beginning by the end of 2010.
Looks like one Frenchie will be buying the other some steak frites. Heh heh, and Arrington says European startups are boring?
@pierre
I will bet all the readers on Techcrunch a steak sandwich that the current OLX will NEVER generate $23.5 million in revenue in its lifetime.
You’re on. By then we will have 3D web 3.0 and you can Paypal me a Philly cheesesteak.
Craigslist is an anomaly to me. I can’t stand from a visitors point of view why the heck someone would use it. The design and navigation are horrible. It feels like a dark secluded back alley where drug pushers and pimps sell the wares. I welcome any competitors that can offer a clean alternative with some moral sense.
moral sense? why not but olx.com also has those “women looking for men,…” sections. I guess that the business sense is taking precedence over the moral sense there too.
Pierre:
We thought long and hard about whether to have the personals category. In the end we decided to let people go there if they want to.
However, we do not have the Erotic Services or the Adult job category and delete prositution when we can detect it.
We actually don’t really make money in Personals anyway – you can’t put Adsense there and it’s a small percentage of our traffic. Our biggest categories are jobs and real estate.
Fabrice
Co-CEO, OLX, Inc.
Take a look at http://www.SuperShopper.org.
Great site without the sleeze!
Yeah and while we’re at it, lets get rid of the nations newspapers. They have those damn escort ads…
True. But it still doesn’t have the same kind of icky feeling that Craigslist does
There is kijiji too
http://melbourn...com/classified/
so you aren’t really into reading the articles, just commenting?
The best feature of OLX is that you can browe listings from 2006! I’m sure that PS2 is still for sale!
That’s exactly why I never use OLX. Is misleading since it shows old listings, close to one year old in order to show more results (or increase their pages or listings in the network). It makes you browse and browse listings you really don’t need or want to see. Once I called someone for a product and the guy told me it was sold like 8 months ago!. Craiglist listings have an expiration day so you get “fresh” listings. They should change this. I understand they may use it to increase pages but is not a good user experience. Hype doesn’t build great companies, great companies build hype.
Yes and since they do not show the Year in which the thing was posted you don’t even know which April that PS3 was listed (2006,2007,2008,2009). A company that had real traction would not have to resort to this number boosting tactic.
wow.
-too bad they did not think about improving their ability to be found or communicated on the internet. the name is horrendous. wont work in America.
-Craiglife is only a harvester of garbage, it is the phone companies fault for transporting the waste and delivering it to clients.
SellLocator.com – everything must go
completeaholelocator.com — when will you get it, you are annoying as hell.
Yeah, they’d be kicking ass if only they had a whole goddam scroll full o’ domains!!!
no brillient ideas and the design is normal. and the not so popular in some countries
This should do very well and with the economy down, everybody is liquidating.
eBay should buy them out! That would be a great slap in the face to CL. I’m sorry, should we not have bought your competitor.
Thanks for the support!
If you have questions or suggestions, let me know.
BTW We recently redesigned the site and put nice Kayak type Ajax navigators in some categories like Real Estate and Cars.
Noticed you stopped to show the year in which the listing was posted. Do you really need to retain 3+ year old listings to make your site look bigger than it really is. just makes me feel like it’s a smoke and mirrors. Expensive mirrors that is.
The listings are sorted with the newest ones first. You should never see the old listings because they are so far back.
They do appear when you sort by price or best match, but that will be fixed shortly and we will only show results for the past month.
Fabrice said…
sort by price or best match
If you’re looking for the best match item based on closeness rather than exact match , then you might be interested in the CBR (case-based reasoning) technology. It is superior (in terms of information retrieval accuracy & precision) than the traditional SQL-query, which I suspect that it is what you’re using.
I think you had the same reply 1 or 2 years back…
Firstly, TC never talked about LiveWire getting delisted from NASDAQ this past week.
ir.livewiremobile.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=381019
2ndly, Mike Arrington tried this with Edgeio
blog.domaintools.com/2007/12/edgeio-auction/
Edgeio had a 5 million dollar round just like this company.
techcrunch.com/2006/10/24/edgeio-closes-5-million-series-a-financing/
Edgeio had the same model as this company. Why isn’t this one going to meet the same fate?
Chris:
We had a different model than Edgeio. Edgeio was more of a search engine for classifieds, closer to the Oodle or Vast model.
We are more of a community site like Craigslist. Granted that does not mean we will not fail. However, we raised $28.5 million total, we still have a lot of that in the bank and with 50+ million unique visitors per month globally between all our sites we’re starting to get some traction and real revenues.
We could still fail for many reasons, but I think we’re likely to do ok. What’s less clear is how successful we will be. I am hoping we’ll be huge, but the reality is we don’t really know. These things require a combination of hard work and lots of luck.
I can’t wait to find out what’s in store for us!
I should have proofread. We have, not we had
“However, we raised $28.5 million total, we still have a lot of that in the bank”
I don’t know how you managed to get a valuation that high where you could have given 28.5M in equity against your private shares for this little known project, but I guess that’s good.
My coworkers and I are going to the Star Trek debut at 11PM tonight, so I can’t waste time on TC.
I will say good luck to you as you are in a crowded and well defined space. We chose to create a new paradigm and to live in our own space alone, on a plateau, looking over the little people. LOL.
competition? no competition. It is not about technology. It is just the first one with right technology. Like there is no competition to ebay.
At the very least you have to have high availability, either through your own cluster with a SAN, or with Akamai or whatever.
You CAN’T just throw your project on a dedicated 1U server you got at Godaddy and expect it to scale properly.
So many people invest in ideas not understanding this. Even a 4U loaded with 8 quad cores is no match for high volume traffic if your idea has any marketing behind it.
There is a bare minimum, which is why Akamai is a billion dollar a year company.
Chris, your own server keeps telling me
The server at soeet.com is taking too long to respond.
I hope you follow your own advice and fix the issue that caused your whole site to slow to a crawl. I hope it’s because of a flood of traffic from TC… best of luck with your company as well.
Jon
http://WoodMarvels.com – Create Unique Memories
Oh, you mean my media center running WAMP on my roadrunner connection.
OK, it was off when I came back from star trek, so I think it installed automatic updates from Microcrap and shut itself off. I will have a look at the logs. God I hate Vista.
At any rate, that is not the big cluster node we are setting up. That cluster is still in development and is not yet hooked up to the internet.
We have to bring it down to the datacenter. You can click the link to view pictures of it. Again, it’s just being configured here. When we haul it down to Calpop and hook the gigabit fiber in, it will be live.
I think we have about 2 months left before we do that to do it safely where we do it right the first time. This is going to be serving millions of people for years, so we would rather take our time and not mess it up.
That’s just a placeholder page telling people about the project. Nothing more. The project will be served out of calpop in LA and a NY data center. Perhaps more upstate than NYC, but around that area. My super long time friend Jeff is going to manage that cluster since he works at a rack hosting company.
Congrats on the latest round of funding Fabrice, best of luck with OLX! It’s nice to see an entrepreneur replying for comments from an article about his company for a change. Shows well!
Jon
http://WoodMarvels.com – Create Unique Memories
i heard dingleit.com is planning on a classified site?? rumor??
Craigslist killed print classifieds, will twitter kill craigslist?
Will twitter kill TechCrunch?
Twitter is doing the opposite of killing ridiculous comments
Well done Fabrice and Alec.
Good job ! My kudos to Fabrice and especially for Alec, Argentina has great internet entrepeneurs !,
Best Regards,
Mariano.
thanks, Mariano!!
Mariano – That’s so right! It’s curious that so many classifieds ads entrepreneurs come out of Argentina. (evisos.com / clasilistados.org / habitamos.com)
Maybe olx inspires them or there’s something in the Argentineans blood : )
Fabrice are you Argentinean?
Anyways, keep the good work Argentina!!
Dolores:
I am French actually and live in New York, but I spend 2 months a year in Buenos Aires.
Now I know where to go online if I need a blowjob from a “bi-curious” dude anywhere in the world!!!
Fabrice,
Congrats on new funding.
Warmest Regards
George
The thing that amaze me the most is that Alec is not here showing off (for the moment)
here I am!
would sure be nice if someone would give us some money for http://www.jicka.com!
You jokin’ duh?!
you should have named that sight sucksa.com
what’s all this shit with http://www.clasilistados.org ?!
Meaaaaaaaaaaaaan, way a takin’ market share!
Craig is screamin’ lawsuit !!
I checked a few listings in SF, and they seemed pretty spammy.
Craigslist is great, I don’t really see a need for this site.
That means they burned $13.5 million which they had raise last year.
Oops !!!!
And people are complaining of only bank executives getting bonuses.
Who the hell uses OLX as compared to craigslist ?
Lte us see when it hits deadpool!!
Geekevaluation,
We did not burn through the money. We actually still have most of it in the bank.
We raised extra money because:
* I think this crisis will last for a very long time and it’s better to have cash to be ready for the long haul.
* The money was available.
* I suspect we’ll be able to buy advertising or do M&A at lower prices in the future.
OLX is doing a great job!
thanks
Fabrice,
Does OLX avoid credit card payment system becasue of ….?
mptest:
I am not sure what you mean? We accept credit cards if you want to buy a featured listings.
If you mean for transactions between consumers, the issue is that if you post and you get 300 replies, we don’t know who you ended up dealing with. It’s best if you just Paypal the guy directly.
On an auction site where there is only 1 buyer and seller per transaction you can have integrated payments.
It’s the same reason we don’t have a rating system. It would be too easy to game because we could never know who you really did the transaction with.
Good to hear Craigslist will have some competition. That’s what we need.
Good job! keep on rocking!
There seems to be a large boom in the classifieds market. A lot of sites wanting to become the next David to take down Goliath. I’m really interested to see who will be top dog.
From what I’ve seen most sites have a step up from being 2.0, versus 1995 craigslist. But somehow that isn’t enough. Craigslist has built up a strong following but it’ll take some effort on the users to want to reach out to another classifieds site. The problem is a lot of people may not be willing to give that a try.
Absolutely. Ultimately having a better site is not enough. You need to have enough listings and enough people replying to the listings.
That’s why we had to raise that much money to make sure we could build enough momentum though a combination of marketing, partnerships and acquisitions.
I listened to a podcast with Fabrice and at a minimum I can say I love his energy.
Arrington,
Give Fabrice & Co. all their money back, man!
I’m reading all the threads and this looks like a olx is paying to get beaten up ; )
Manny’s punchin’ OLX
http://www.yout...h?v=KdxP2mELggI
GEEE!
“Acording with a post on Alec Oxenford blog, they got 80 million unique visitors a month, very different from what you got, dude.”
Well obviously he is pulling those numbers out of his ass. If they were accurate that would mean that this site gets more traffic than sites like Wikipedia, Baidu, eBay, Craigslist, Yandex, and so on and so froth.
Igor:
These are actually real numbers. However, we have much fewer pages per visit so we’re much smaller in terms of page views.
Fabrice,
Congrats on your recent funding! Good job!
so far my favorite is a site called dingleit.com, they are new but they are just super simple and they dont have all those crappy personal ads, and all the “erotic” services. craigslist is gettting way to sketchy for me to use anymore. and olx doesnt look much better….
if you’re gonna big up your own site, don’t know anyone elses. It’s called Marketing 101, it makes your site look bad too.
But, hey, good luck.
By the way, congrats to Fabrice, puts in a lot of effort into his work, and is well respected in the internet industry, and the VC’s trust him.
More argentineans!!!!! And thks!! I just found a website I was looking for among your posts: http://www.clasilistados.org
I’m loving this site: refreshing!
I meant don’t knock anyone else’s – jeez – time for a new keyboard…..
i wish that was my site man.. cool for profilin! good work
This will clearly be Fabrice’s fall, much like the rest of his portfolio post Zingy. Allmydata.com, etc are all train wrecks. Notice he has removed his portfolio of investments on his blog because they are all disasters, which he hopes goes unnoticed. What he lacks for in charm, he makes up for in unmitigated arrogance. OLX.com has no traction and no real growth, which is why no original investors have repeated their investments. A matter of time before it fails. At least he admits it might yet fail – and that he admits this – is a clear sign someone as egotistical as him expects it to.
wow, John, you certainly don´t like Fabrice! you should meet Fabrice. I am positive you would change your opinion.
I have known Fabrice for 10 years now and I can tell you, there are very few entrepreneurs around with Fabrice´s vision, brains and energy.
with regards to OLX, so far it is clearly a story of growth in many countries. OLX is top 3 (sometimes #1) in Portugal, Spain, Brazil, Russia, Mexico and five other smaller countries. and OLX is growing quickly in many other coutries.
by the way, it is also absolutely not true that original investors did not repeat their investments. actually ALL 3 original financial investors repeated their investments in OLX’s second round. you should talk to them as well and ask them about their opinion of OLX. I think you would be very surprised.
best,
Alec Oxenford
Co-CEO, OLX, inc
I have two questions: You said OLX is top 3 (sometimes #1) in Portugal, Spain, Brazil, Russia, Mexico and five other smaller countries. and OLX is growing quickly in many other coutries. Where did you get this information?
I did my searched and I found:
18->Portugal :: 58->Brazil :: 70->Mexico :: Spain->189
Actually, I think all this position it’s pretty good for a business has less than 5 years however far away from top 5.
And the other question you said the OLX have 80 million unique visitors and Fabrice said 50+ million unique vistors. Why both have very different numbers? It’s commom sense to grow up from 50 million to 80 million you need a lot of hard working and good luck like Fabrice said.
John:
I apologize if I have ever done something to offend you.
I assume you are an entrepreneur I gave feedback to? When I give feedback to entrepreneurs I am very direct, but I would like to believe that does not make me arrogant. I also mentioned, I don’t like to rate ideas (http://www.fabr...inda.com/?p=720). On the Internet you never really know what’s going to work so it’s often best to throw it on the wall and see if it sticks and iterate, iterate, iterate.
My portfolio companies are still on my blog – you can see them at http://www.fabricegrinda.com/ (they are only on the home page though). Granted some are doing better than others and one was just dissolved. I expect at least 50% to close, but that’s kind of the name of the game in seed investing. Many of them were seeded with the idea of getting the product out, getting some traction and then raising a Series A round. Given the market conditions, that’s unforunately unlikely to happen for many of them.
With regards to Zingy, the company was doing great until I sold it to ForSide and it was still doing well when I left. Sales went from $1 million in 2002 to $5 million in 2003 to $50 million in 2004 to $200 million in 2005. I sold it in May 2004 and left in November 2005. You can ask any of the insiders and they will tell you our new owners ruined the company.
As for OLX, of course it can fail. Any company can fail for a variety of reasons, but from within the company “things just feel right” currently. Alec answered your other points…
Have a great week-end!
Fabrice
There is plenty of room for mutiple players within the classified space. kijiji, oodle, vast, olx, geebo, ilist and craigslist clearly demonstrate this. What will be interesting to see is who is left standing two years from now. My best guess is two, perhaps three of the above will no longer be with us.
You gotta have some skin in the game!
OLX’s strength is in their White label partnership.
In India, OLX has partnered with HT Media (one of the largest print media) to launch generic classifieds site AskHT.com
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It’s Attorneys General, not Attorney Generals.
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It appears to be one of the first true CL competitor that came out a few years ago. A few million users, they have kept their market to specific Tier A US cities and offer upgradable ($) services to otherwise free ads. Can’t find much info on them though – thus they appear to be a quiet (and seemingly) grassroots effort.
Word is that they are getting ready to deliver a whole suite of business type services and are now working on a ‘next-gen’ application that they are claiming will revolutionize the online classifieds industry. Sounds interesting, but exactly how do you revolutionize classifieds?
PS: What ‘website’ needs $28M in funding? OLX doesn’t seem to offer anything different than CL.
The issue with launching a classifieds site is not the technology. It’s getting liquidity – you need people listing and people replying to the listings.
We raised money mostly to find ways to generate that liquidity through a combination of partnerships, acquisitions and marketing.
Fabrice
Yeah Fabrice.
your site is cool. i have read word by word. i am afraid i will visit it often.
Also check out up-and-coming local classified ads web site:
http://www.IHav...lankForSale.com