CarWoo! Fuels Continued Growth With $6M In New Funding
December 14, 2011 – Burlingame, Calif. – CarWoo! announces the closing of a $6M funding round, bringing total funding to over $12M. With the funding, CarWoo! is adding industry veterans Rudi Thun, formerly General Manager of AOL Autos, and Phil Yeh, previously from Dealix.
CarWoo! finalized the additional funding from investors InterWest Partners, Comcast Ventures, Blumberg Capital, Raymond Tonsing and others. Having more than quadrupled its dealer network over the past year to over 11,000 dealers, CarWoo! intends to use this round of funding to continue that level of growth with their consumers, to launch new products, to further develop the team and to cultivate strategic partnerships.
Michael Yang, Managing Director at Comcast Ventures, says, “We are excited to be part of such a fast growing company. The trajectory that CarWoo! is on with regard to engaging car shoppers, dealers, and automotive manufacturers has accelerated over the last year. CarWoo! has positioned themselves as the win-win solution in the industry.”
The addition of Thun as Chief Operating Officer and Yeh as Vice President of Marketing brings additional industry specific expertise and discipline to the existing CarWoo! team.
Thun comes to CarWoo! after over nine years at AOL, where he was responsible for the strategy, product, marketing, editorial, design, and development of AOL Autos and Autoblog.com. During the past several years Thun doubled AOL’s automotive web traffic to over 10M unique visitors per month while also doubling revenue. Thun is a graduate of Cornell University and earned an MBA from the Walter A. Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.
“CarWoo! is the most innovative online automotive company I have seen in a long time,” says Thun. “When the opportunity came to join the CarWoo! team, I was eager to jump on board. I truly believe that CarWoo! will permanently change the way cars are bought and sold and I really look forward to being a part of the change.”
Yeh joins CarWoo! from SpeedDate.com where he was also Vice President of Marketing. Previously, he spent four years at Dealix, the largest lead provider to auto dealers nationwide, where he was Director of Marketing and ran consumer marketing for automotive portals including UsedCars.com. Yeh holds a degree in Business Administration and attended Santa Clara University School of Law.
“Having Rudi and Phil join our team, closing this round of funding, and demonstrating the strong progress to date are all great endorsements of what we are doing,” says Tommy McClung, CEO of CarWoo!. “We have gained significant traction throughout the industry. CarWoo! is supporting over 11,000 dealers, and with our new initiatives in 2012, we are poised to become the foremost online destination for car buyers and sellers alike.”
About CarWoo!
CarWoo! provides the online MarketPlace where buyers get great deals with no games and dealers are able sell cars online using their own unique approaches with a full understanding of the buyers through the CarWoo! transparent MarketPlace. Buyers remain anonymous, get great market prices, save a ton of time and dealers are ensured buyers who purchase within 3.5 days 80% of the time. As seen on The Today Show, CNN Money and other leading national media outlets, CarWoo! is the only true online MarketPlace for car buyers and sellers. CarWoo! was founded in 2008 by serial entrepreneurs, Tommy McClung, Erik Landerholm and Michael Young. With early funding by Y Combinator, CarWoo! is based in Burlingame, CA and is now funded by Blumberg Capital, Comcast Ventures and InterWest Partners, and others. Find us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/carwoo and on Twitter at twitter.com/carwoo.
