A retail technology startup dubbed Rodo has secured $18 million in new financing that includes funds from Kevin Hart’s HartBeat Ventures.
Rodo is an online service that allows customers to buy or lease new vehicles and have them delivered the same day. The company does not maintain its own fleet of vehicles and is instead partnered with more than 1,200 dealerships across the United States. Many of these dealerships are located in New York and California.
In addition to HartBeat Ventures making an investment in Rodo, New Jersey-based auto sector services provider Holman Enterprises and New York-based Evolution VC Partners also invested. Other investors include longtime dealer and vice chairman of RML Automotive, Mack McLarty, and Texas dealer Ken Schnitzer, Auto News reports.
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The new $18 million in financing brings the company’s total funding to $45 million. Approximately 70 per cent of the $18 million will be allocated towards customer acquisition while the rest will be used to scale its dealership network.
“For the rest of this year, we plan to keep the dealer network around the same size as it is now…and we’re going to focus on enhancing the relationship with those dealers and further promoting Rodo in those regions,” Rodo founder and chief executive Nathan Hecht told Auto News. “That’s our near-term strategy.”
Hecht added the company will expand its dealership network in 2022.
“We’ll add incrementally around 100 dealers a quarter, maybe 150 per quarter, by the end of 2022. If we end ’22 with about 1,800 dealers, maybe close to 2,000, that would be a good number for us.”
