Circular-crazy Lithuania creates another winner

Lithuania’s inclination to make use of what others might discard looks to have bred another winning start-up.

What is about Lithuania and second-hand goods?

Already the home of Vinted—Europe’s largest online marketplace for second-hand clothes—the Baltic country is also nurturing another start-up with global ambitions based around the resale of second-hand goods; in this case, car parts.

The start-up in question, Ovoko, was founded in 2016 but has seen enormous growth over the past couple of years. Its revenue more than doubled in 2023 to 22.5 million euros, with more than 3,000 used car parts sellers from all over Europe using its platform.

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A start-up with ambitions of reaching, like Vinted, unicorn status, Ovoko last week secured series B funding of 20 million euros in a round led by Smash Capital, a Los Angeles-based venture capital firm that invests in growth-stage technology companies, focusing on sectors such as consumer internet and gaming, financial services, healthcare, enterprise software, and commerce.

The investment is the largest in the Lithuanian start-up ecosystem this year.

Ovoko provides three main products: a SaaS platform for used car parts sellers to digitalise and manage their goods, a marketplace itself where users can buy parts, and a logistics solution to deliver parts to buyers through partnerships with various logistics companies in Europe.

Ovoko intends to use the funds to develop all three products, and to expand its team which is expected to grow by 100 new employees within 18 months.

It already has a team of nearly 200 employees and operates in 17 countries. Ovoko has facilitated the sale of over one million car parts and attracts around six million visitors to its website each month.

“We have already proved to both the market and investors that our business model works and we can work profitably,” says Justinas Baranovskis, Ovoko’s co-founder and CEO.

“We now have the ambition to become the largest and most attractive platform for e-commerce of used car parts throughout Europe. The confidence of investors and the attracted investments will allow us to move towards this goal in a purposeful way and to expand both quantitatively and qualitatively.”

A potentially huge market

According to Brad Twohig, managing partner and co-founder of Smash Capital, it’s difficult to accurately calculate the size of the used car parts market in Europe, “but no one doubts that it is huge”.

“Modern and customised solutions are still lacking here,” he adds. “We have no doubt that the Ovoko team is capable of not only modernising the market, but also helping other businesses in this space expand and grow.”

Indeed, reinventing a circular economy for car parts is an ambitious plan—the industry is notoriously wasteful. But then so was the fast fashion marketplace until Vinted changed the game.

Lithuania’s inclination to make use of what others might discard looks to have bred another winner.

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