They grow up so fast
- Back in 2012, National University of Singapore (NUS) alumni – Quek Siu Rui, Marcus Tan and Lucas Ngoo – built the Carousell app after a year-long stint in Silicon Valley; they envisioned a peer-to-peer marketplace where NUS students could sell things to each other.
- 500-backed recommerce platform became a company with a valuation over US$1 billion in 2021, and today has offices across 8 locations in Southeast Asia, India, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, with “tens of millions of monthly active users and 80 million new listings annually”.
- Kicking off their 2nd decade, 500-backed recommerce platform Carousell opens its new regional headquarters in Singapore at startup incubator space LaunchPad @ one-north.
- Dubbed ‘Carousell Campus’, the space features an events hall designed to host over 100 people, multiple meeting rooms inspired by real life stories, including one tucked behind bookcases, and a light fixture in the shape of Carousell’s logo created from repurposed office tables.
- “This space marks a coming-of-age for Carousell as a Group. Recommerce means bringing the best things that we know and like from e-commerce and availing it for secondhand products,” said co-founder and CEO Siu Rui.
- Carousell Campus also houses the Group’s first Capabilities Centre – where the team authenticate and inspect products across its Certified programme, which guarantees quality and authenticity of high value items such as luxury bags before they go on sale in Carousell official stores.
- “It boils down to trust and convenience as the biggest barriers stopping potential buyers and sellers of second-hand, and that’s really what we’re trying to do over the next decade,” said Siu Rui.
- Read the full feature on Vulcan Post.
