Avito — The Multi Billion Dollar Startup You’ve (Probably) Never Heard Of
Avito, the Accel-backed Russian online classifieds company, is a startup you may never have heard of; it is also a very special one.
The company morphed from a kind of old school yellow pages and auction site in 2007 into a pure play online classifieds by 2008 and never looked back, becoming a leader in every classifieds category it entered, from dogs and cats to real estate to cars and general classifieds.
Accel co-led a $75M investment with Baring Vostok and joined the board in early 2012. We are delighted to announce that Naspers is taking a majority stake in Avito, in a landmark transaction which values the business at $2.7 billion. Read Robin Wauters at Tech.eu for more.
Note : the transaction is subject to approval by anti-trust authorities and by the South African Reserve Bank.
At the heart of Avito’s success is the very unique story of two visionary Swedes, Jonas and Filip, who decided to start a classifieds business back in 2007, pack it up and move to Moscow and proceeded to turn it into one of Europe’s most impressive online properties together with their Russian-Swedish team. A mixture of smart execution and grittiness allowed them to make it though the 2008 crisis and emerge as the winner in the race to build Russia’s Craigslist –a hyper local business across 80+ cities in the largest landmass in the world. Avito is today one of the top 3 classifieds sitesglobally.
The online classifieds sector is an attractive winner-takes-all market: if a player can reach 3–5x the size of the second actor in the relevant categories, that company benefits from a snowball effect, achieving superior liquidity and becoming difficult to displace. Examples include CraigsList in the US or LeBonCoin in France. But whilst there is a well understood blueprint of what it takes to build a leading vertical classifieds business, Avito gets incredibly strong marks for achieving leadership in both horizontal as well as vertical categories: as if Craigslist were merged with Zillow and Autotrader. A unique and incredible achievement.
We are truly grateful to have been involved in one of the great marketplace stories of our time, and send our heartfelt thanks to Jonas, Filip and all the dedicated team members who turned Avito into such as stunning success. Congratulations to you and Naspers!
(Co-authored with my partner Sonali de Rycker who sponsored this great investment and is a proud supporter of Team Avito)
