VarageSale raises $34 million

VarageSale raises cash to fuel its rapid growth. VarageSale is the Craigslist of Web 2.0.

VarageSale announced it got investments from Lightspeed and Sequoia and raised $34 million. The company will use the financing to support product development, community growth and to expand its team in Toronto, Canada. Jeremy Liew, partner at Lightspeed and Bryan Schreier, partner at Sequoia, have also joined VarageSale’s board of directors.

It is not easy for a startup that is not located in Silicon Valley to raise investment from prime VCs like Squoia. This achievement underlines that VarageSale is onto a solid growth trajectory.

“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.”

“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.”

VarageSale offers members an online community where they can find deals and sell their items for extra cash. VarageSale differentiates itself from other local classified sites with its local users who act as administrators and moderate each community to ensure members have real identities and can transact in a safe, enjoyable environment. These local communities are backstopped by VarageSale’s mobile app.

“We’re excited to be working with a Toronto-based company that has global impact. VarageSale has created a compelling new category by marrying community and commerce through trust,” said Schreier. “They’re succeeding where others have failed by recreating on mobile the community feeling of buying and selling with neighbors. The incredible passion and engagement of VarageSale customers is producing a cultural movement unlike any other.”

“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.”

VarageSale was founded in 2012. The company says that it has millions of members in communities across USA, Canada and around the world. VarageSale is free to use on the web and on the mobile app, which is available on for iOS, Android and Kindle devices.