Careers at Carousell

Mission

Carousell’s mission is to offer an easy and simple way to buy and sell amongst ourselves in order to fill our lives with more meaningful materials.

History

Carousell was founded on May 1, 2012 by four young brilliant minds from the National University of Singapore (NUS), Quek Siu Rui, Siu Rui Quek, Marcus Tan, and Lucas Ngoo. Marcus Tan and Lucas Ngoo were on a one-year visit to Silicon Valley sponsored by NUS, which would be the inspiration for the idea of exploiting technology to better lives and the formation of Carouesell.

Carousell is an online mobile platform for buying and selling. Like most ideas the Carousell idea was faced with skepticism and rejection. The founders’ professor at NUS was the first to show his lack of faith in the Carousell idea. This however, did not deter the young students from persisting and following up with their professor in order to pitch their idea in more detail. The professor was partially convinced and granted the team $7000 for building the very first Carousell app.

In September 2012, Startup Weekend was held in Singapore in where 80 teams would compete in the competition and only 20 teams would proceed to the final round. The Carousell team ended up winning the entire competition and that was the beginning a beautiful story of four ambitious men who would not take no for an answer. The team graduated from NUS in 2013 and now had sufficient time to give Carousell the attention it demanded. On August 2012, Carousell launched its first IOS app.

Carousell received seed funding from government grants and QuestVC. The company received further seed funding of $800,000 million from the Japanese company Rakuten. In November 2013, Rakuten, made a follow-up investment of $1 million along with 500 Startups, Golden Gate Ventures, among other investors.

In November 2014, Carousell secured $6 million in its series A funding, which was led by Sequoia Capital, Rakuten Ventures, 500 Startups, Golden Gate Ventures, and Darius Cheung. The company received a further $50 million in its Series B funding, which was led by Rakuten, 500 Startups, Golden Gate Ventures, and Sequoia Capital. Carousell primarily used this funding to expand its outreach to Malaysia, Indonesia, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.

Since then Carousell has over 40 million listings and is currently one of the biggest and fastest-growing global marketplaces with its primary users falling within the age bracket of 16 to 34 years of age each opening the Carousell app an average of 10 times each day. Carousell is currently the number one ranking shopping & lifestyle app in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. The Carousell story as mentioned earlier is a beautiful and inspiring story of tenacity, persistence, and perseverance and with such qualities we cannot wait to see what comes next for the team.

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