Marketplace Memo #6
Uber with Guns, $100M at $2B for Mercor, Getaround shuts US down, Turo pulls IPO, $81.8B in GMV for Airbnb and much more.
Hi, it’s Colin! Welcome to the 161 new subscribers who joined Take Rate since the last Marketplace Memo. I am excited to have you join the 2,940+ marketplace founders, operators, and investors who subscribe. Join the fun! 👇
👋 Welcome to the 6th edition of the Marketplace Memo. My goal is to share curated news, content, and stories I am seeing related to marketplaces with a splash of color from me. Please enjoy and share with others!
The Speed of Marketplace Scale
When marketplaces hit, they hit fast. This week's fundraising announcements highlight a pattern that's impossible to ignore in marketplace businesses—the rapid compression of fundraising timelines once product-market fit is achieved. Take Mercor, for example, which grew 6,400% year over year after its Series A, or Temu's meteoric rise to $50B in GMV just two years after launch. It isn’t always immediately, but when market pull kicks in, be ready.
This acceleration creates an interesting dynamic in early-stage marketplace investing. At the pre-seed stage, it's notoriously difficult to predict which marketplaces will achieve escape velocity or when. The metrics are often too early to be meaningful, and the true potential of the network effects isn't yet visible. However, once a marketplace successfully matches supply and demand in a way that creates real value for both sides, growth can be explosive as this inflection point is hit. This acceleration or hockey-stick growth makes investing more obvious, which makes the Seed, Series A, and B rounds highly competitive.
For marketplaces, product-market fit manifests uniquely - it's about finding that sweet spot where supply and demand connect and transact, creating a self-reinforcing cycle of transactions. When this happens, the growth curve can steepen dramatically. From my time working in marketplaces, scaling should feel like monkeys on a rocket ship - chaotic, fast, and a bit out of control. Your job is to remove the obstacles to growth as the market will pull you.
The challenge for investors, particularly at pre-seed, is identifying which marketplaces have the right conditions for this exponential growth. It's about looking beyond current metrics to evaluate the fundamental dynamics that could enable rapid scaling once the initial supply-demand match is achieved. For founders, this means being prepared for that moment of acceleration - having the infrastructure, team, and capital to harness the momentum when it arrives.
The Highlight of the Week
When you think you have seen everything, a new app pops up in your feed…
This time, it is "Uber with guns." And it’s no joke. It has reached the top three on the app store. 🤯 So what is this app? It is a marketplace for protection where you can book armed bodyguards. See more on Twitter/X.
But this is not an ordinary app—the Midas Touch of Nikita Bier graces it. If you don’t know Nikita, he is known for co-founding viral social apps like TBH, which was acquired by Facebook, and Gas, which Discord acquired. He is also masterful at trolling on X. The app is life in LA and NYC, with cool features like picking the guard’s attire and renting multiple cars to have a motorcade.
News
"Redfin Partners with Zillow Amid Layoffs" - The digital brokerage is outsourcing its rental division to Zillow and significantly downsizing its staff.
puts it well on his LinkedIn post: “It's very hard to compete with a marketplace once it hits scale.” If you can’t beat them, join them. Seattle Times"Getaround Abruptly Shuts Down US Car-sharing Operations" - The publicly traded peer-to-peer car-sharing marketplace is still around but has pulled the plug on the US. TechCrunch
"Turo Scraps Plans for an IPO" - On the heels of the Getaround shutdown, the other car-sharing marketplace has postponed its plans to go public amid market uncertainty and company performance. TechCrunch
Bryan Petro steps into the CEO role at Getmyboat - Leadership change at the boat-sharing marketplace. LinkedIn
HomeToGo acquires Interhome - The vacation rental marketplace acquired Europe’s second-largest vacation rental management company. It's an interesting move to own and potentially roll up the supply. LinkedIn
Airbnb Q4 2024 Shareholder Letter Released - $17.6B in GMV for Q4, growing at 13% YoY. The company is massive, but growth is slowing. It begs the question of what they do next. How do they expand the TAM? Well, it seems they have been rebuilding the platform for the business. The letter states: “With this new tech platform, we can innovate faster and expand beyond short-term rentals into an extensible platform with a range of new offerings.” Currently, there are stays and experiences; it will be interesting to see what they pick next. Typical travel categories would include flights and rental cars or even expanding into hotels. Airbnb might just be starting its OTA era. Airbnb
"Airbnb CEO Says It's Still Too Early for AI Trip Planning" - This is probably right, but I have to imagine they are working hard on this internally, and if not, they are just leaving the door open for disruption. TechCrunch
Rare Candy reaches 25M Pokemon card scans - The Pokemon marketplace app introduced card-collecting features in the middle of 2024 and has 30x active users. Product market fit is a fantastic thing. LinkedIn
Fundraising
Mercor raises $100M Series B at $2B Valuation led by Felicis with participation from Benchmark, General Catalyst, DST Global, and Menlo Ventures. This valuation is a whopping 8x what the company received on its Series A in 2024. Mercor is an AI recruiting marketplace. A podcast exclusive about the fund round from 20VC is below. TechCrunch
Clutch secures $50M Series D led by Altos. Clutch is Canada’s largest online used car seller, which rebounded from a recap in 2023 and is now poised for growth. Additional color here from long-time investor FJ Labs. BNN Bloomberg
Coll-X raises $10M Series A led by Bobby Witt Jr., Brand Foundry, and 114 Ventures. Coll-X is a trading card marketplace app. CLLCT
Metycle raises $14.7M Series A led by 2150 along with DFF Ventures, Market One Capital, Partech, and Project A. Metcycle is an AI-powered metal recycling marketplace based in Germany. Recycling Today
Fetii raises $7.35M Seed led by Mark Cuban, with participation from Y Combinator, Goodwater Capital. Fetii is a group ridesharing platform. TechCrunch
Hydra Host raises a Seed+ led by Flume Ventures, NEA, and Saga Ventures. Hydra Host is a GPU rental marketplace. Hydra Host
Did I miss one? Email colin@yonder.vc with the subject line “Fundraising Announcement” to be included.
Reads
The Rule of 40 vs. Valuation multiples for marketplaces - This is an excellent chart by dealroom.co and Flow partners, which shows the marketplaces with higher Rule of 40 percentages also tend to have higher multiples. This chart indicates that classified models tend to have the highest Rule of 40 number and valuation, though they might be capped on overall enterprise size. LinkedIn
Social commerce is changing how we buy online - Here is another great chart from the dealroom.co team, highlighting how TikTok shop alone changes how we buy online. Dealroom
Fiverr launches a platform for freelancers to train a custom AI model and sell the output - Olivia Moore shares an X thread on the new feature, and it will be fascinating to see how it works out. Given how AI heavily impacts labor marketplaces, I view this as an inevitable evolution. Twitter/X
“Procurement Led Marketplaces” - Another insightful post from SNAK Venture Partners on how procurement marketplaces are having a moment with AI. It is a big space, and according to their post, the “U.S. wholesale trade agent and broker industry was $774.5 billion in 2024.”
“A Fully Loaded Approach to Analyzing Marketplaces” - The Headline team has shared a comprehensive framework for evaluating marketplace businesses. Headline
"The Venture Capital Funnel" - Peter Walker from Carta shares insights on graduation rates of startups. Founders and investors take note! LinkedIn
“The Founder's Toolkit #1: Starting Your Fundraising and Building Your Investor Pipeline” - A post from yours truly on how to run a fundraising process and build an investor pipeline (with a free CRM template!).
Watch or Listen
"An Interview with Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi" - A banger of a discussion about Uber, Dara, aggregation strategies, and the future of autonomous vehicles in ridesharing. Stratechery
"Adarsh Hiremath, Co-Founder & CTO @ Mercor: The Most Intense Culture in Silicon Valley" - A great episode of 20VC with the CTO of Mercor diving into the Mercor story. This episode is worth listening to to understand the companies ’s story and how network effects are even more critical in the era of AI. Twenty Minute VC
“Peer-to-Peer #2: $800B Excess Inventory Market With Amantha Bagdon of RxPost and Amrita Bhasin of Sotira” - Amantha of RxPost and Amrita of Sotira talk about their experiences building excess inventory marketplaces in pharmaceutical and consumer packaged goods as well as the lessons they learned. Take Rate
"Founders and Speed Funding Scalable Marketplaces with Jeroen Arts" - Discussion on marketplace funding strategies and scalability challenges. Sharetribe
"Kirsten Green’s $500M Bet on Consumer AI" - A great interview with Kristen Green of Forerunner, a big investor in consumer marketplaces. YouTube
“Investing in Marketplaces” - I know, I know one more thing with me in it! This was a fun podcast to record, specifically about investing in marketplaces.
Marketplace Jobs
Want to see your job listed here? Email colin@yonder.vc with the subject line “Job Posting” to be included or get your job featured!
Thanks for reading!
That is a wrap for the week! As always, please email me at colin@yonder.vc with any missed feedback or news. Hot tips are always welcome. Please don’t forget to subscribe and follow me on X and LinkedIn for other great marketplace content. If you want to book a call, you can find me on Intro.
About Me:
Colin is a marketplace geek and the General Partner of Yonder, a pre-seed marketplace fund that invests in marketplaces that create new economies. He has also been a long-time advisor to marketplaces, helping them with product growth, monetization, liquidity optimization, and strategy. Previously, he was the CPO/CRO at Outdoorsy and worked at Tripping.com, Ancestry.com, Justanswer, and the Federal Reserve.
The early-stage struggle is real... pre-seed feels like betting on shadows, but once supply-demand locks in, it’s less about pushing and more about holding on for dear life. Also, "Uber with guns" hitting top 3 on the App Store is peak 2024. Nikita Bier really does have the Midas touch. The man could launch a rock-passing app and make it viral. Thanks for this article, Colin.