It’s been a bumpy road for online used vehicle marketplaces this past year, with most contenders either scaling back or falling out of the race altogether. Despite heavy rounds of advertising, consumers are still leery about getting stuck with a lemon when they purchase a car online — but this prejudice is finally beginning to fad as more and more consumers switch to online shopping for their big ticket needs. This is currently being proved by one of the industry’s veterans — Vroom, which recently raised a Series H loan that totals over 254 million dollars. A company spokesperson says Vroom will be using the welcome infusion of cash to both expand its business base and to open an engineering and product marketing hub in the city of Detroit — a city that knows about cars and welcomes anything to do with them.
The New York-based online company says it has experienced a tripling of business since last winter, and currently has approximately three thousand vehicles available on their platform, with over four hundred different makes and models.
Company chief Paul Hennessy, who as CEO of Priceline.com led that company into a successful expansion of both business and marketing, says that Vroom is proud to be a part of Detroit’s resurgence and hopes to add at least several hundred more jobs to the city’s economy by the end of 2020.