Frontend Engineer

OLX just raised another $13.5 million from General Catalyst, Bessemer Venture Partners, Founders Fund and DN Capital. This brings the total raised to $23.5 million as we had raised $10 million in September 2006 from the same VCs and various angels.
My two favorite VCs – Joel Cutler and Jeremy Levine, from General Catalyst and Bessemer Venture Partners respectively, remain on the board alongside my co-founder Alec Oxenford and myself.
We thought long and hard about whether we should raise more cash. In the end, in light of our ambitions and the insurance it buys in a probable economic downturn, we felt that raising more cash was the best solution despite the incremental dilution and liquidation preference.
We will use the funds to:
- Build the best site in the market
- Further our global deployment (we are currently in 40 countries in 15 languages)
- Acquire more sites (we already acquired Mundoanuncio.com, Freestreet.it, Freeads.ru and invested in Edeng.cn)
- Continue our aggressive marketing campaign
We intend to be extremely careful in how we spend the money to make sure that it lasts us until profitability.
We realize we remain a startup and need to keep our low cost and nimble startup culture. We are still at the beginning of a long road that will hopefully lead to the creation of the best free classified site in the world and allow us to make a difference in the life of our customers.
You can also read a TechCrunch article on the fund raising at:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/11/craigslist-competitor-olx-raises-135m/