Berlin start-up TradeMachines, the world’s largest meta search engine for industrial auctions, launched a 500,000€ equity crowdfunding campaign on Companisto yesterday. In the first day, the startup secured over 158,874€ from over 164 investors toward its goal. Since 2013, TradeMachines has brokered machine sales worth €2 billion, Listing 30 % of the stock of all European auctions. Not bad for two years in the business.
In early 2013, TradeMachines founder Heico Koch, who holds a doctorate in mechanical engineering, noticed that a significant number of used machines offered online and no global marketplace where buyers could look for relevant professional machines offered for sale. Both sellers and auctioneers often reached only buyers within the same region through print media.
“There simply was no online marketplace listing all the offers out there, let alone all offers worldwide,” Heico Koch explained. “There is a global flow of goods, for instance of agricultural machines sold from Western Europe to Eastern Europe and of woodworking machines sold from Western Europe to Asia, that TradeMachines also wants to handle.”
Today, TradeMachines is the world’s largest meta search engine for industrial auctions. TradeMachines scans the internet for current auctions of used machines, sorts these auctions by machine types and creates a profile page for each machine. Customers may compare prices and access a wide range of used machines heretofore inaccessible. Machines sold at auction range from professional road construction machines and fork-lift trucks to industrial cranes for construction sites. TradeMachines also brokers smaller tool and machine auctions, such as wood saws, metal saws, and lawn mowers.
Since its launch, the company has grown rapidly. In Europe, TradeMachines lists as much as 30 % of the stock of all used machine auctions combined, connecting buyers with sellers around the globe every 8.6 seconds. To date, TradeMachines has brokered machine sales worth a total of approx. €2.6 billion.
The company generates revenues by redirecting potential buyers to sellers’ websites, utilizing the “cost per click” (CPC) business model identical to the model used for advertising on Google. TradeMachines negotiates individual prices per click with each seller, and the average price is currently €0.30. TradeMachines is the market leader within a market whose annual sales volume is approximately €380 billion, growing by 40% every year. TradeMachines seeks to become the number one website for used machines. To reach this goal, TradeMachines will invest the funds raised through equity crowdfunding in IT optimization, technical scalability, internationalization and the further expansion of its product range.
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