Online marketplace VarageSale partners with US top venture capital firms Sequoia and Lightspeed and raises $34 million

TORONTO, April 2, 2015 /CNW/ - VarageSale, the online marketplace for people to buy, sell and connect with their local communities, today announced it has partnered with Lightspeed and Sequoia and raised $34 million. The company will use the financing to support product development, community growth and to expand its Toronto team. Jeremy Liew, partner at Lightspeed and Bryan Schreier, partner at Sequoia, have also joined VarageSale's board of directors.

"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."

The company is moving to a new downtown office space to accommodate for its rapid growth. The new space reflects the rich but short history of VarageSale's communities with themed meeting rooms and member quotes.

"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."

The fun way to buy, sell and connect locally, VarageSale offers members a safe online community where they can do what they love: find great 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 user-friendly 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."

About VarageSale
VarageSale is an online marketplace that brings people together to buy, sell and connect with their local community.  Founded in 2012, VarageSale has millions of members in communities across USA, Canada and around the world. VarageSale is free to use at www.varagesale.com and on the mobile app, which is available on for iOS, Android and Kindle devices.

About Lightspeed
Lightspeed Venture Partners is a premier venture capital firm with over $3 billion of committed capital under management and investment professionals in Silicon Valley, India, Israel and China with Lightspeed China Partners. Over the past two decades, Lightspeed partners have backed more than 200 consumer and enterprise technology companies, many of which have become leaders in their respective markets, including GrubHub, Nest, Snapchat, The Honest Company, Nimble Storage, Nicira, AppDynamics, DataStax, Nutanix, FusionIO, Riverbed Technology, Brocade, Ciena, DoubleClick, and XtremIO. www.lsvp.com

About Sequoia
The Sequoia team helps a small number of daring founders build legendary companies. We spur them to push the boundaries of what's possible. In partnering with Sequoia, companies benefit from our unmatched community and the lessons we've learned over 40 years working with Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, John Morgridge, Jerry Yang, Elon Musk, Larry Page, Jan Koum, Brian Chesky, Drew Houston, Adi Tatarko and Jack Dorsey, among many others. In aggregate, Sequoia-backed companies account for more than 20% of NASDAQ's total value. We're proud that their success also fuels great causes: since 2000 alone we have returned more than $10 billion to non-profits like the Ford Foundation, Mayo Clinic and MIT.

SOURCE VarageSale