Frontier Car’s 26-Year-Old CEO Strikes $400 Million Prosus Deal
Frontier Car’s 26-Year-Old CEO Strikes $400 Million Prosus Deal
Prosus NV’s online classifieds business, OLX Group, said it will invest as much as $400 million in Frontier Car Group, to become the startup’s largest investor.
The investment values Frontier Car at about $700 million and will merge the company’s businesses with OLX, the Prosus unit said in a statement on Monday. OLX invested $89 million in the Berlin-based company last year.
Frontier Car’s Chief Executive Officer and co-founder Sujay Tyle, 26, was previously chief operating officer of Hired Inc. where he was part of the founding team. While an undergraduate at Harvard, he founded ReSight, an organization dedicated to treating blindness, according to his Linked-In profile.
The deal will include an injection of cash into Frontier Car. OLX will also offer to acquire shares held by other investors, founders and management. The companies didn’t disclose further financial details.
After OLX, Frontier Car’s management will be the largest investors in the company, Tyle said, declining to provide more specifics.
Frontier Car was started about three years ago as a marketplace for used cars in emerging markets -- initially targeting Mexico, Chile, Turkey, Nigeria, Pakistan and Indonesia. Since then, it’s expanded to 10 countries and had previously raised more than $150 million from investors including OLX, TPG Capital and Balderton Capital.
Prosus was spun off from South Africa’s Naspers Ltd. in September and tends to let its holding companies operate independently. The firm has mounted a hostile bid for take-out app Just Eat Plc, challenging an offer from Takeaway.com NV.
OLX operates a series of classifieds and marketplace business that serve more than 350 million people per month. The investment will give Frontier Car access to OLX technology for managing dealers and resale as well as pricing and provenance data, the company said.
To contact the reporter on this story: Loni Prinsloo in Johannesburg at lprinsloo3@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Rebecca Penty at rpenty@bloomberg.net, Amy Thomson, Giles Turner
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