NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--letgo, the fastest growing mobile marketplace to buy and sell locally, today announced that it has surpassed 30M downloads and 13.2M monthly active users worldwide in only its first year since launch, with a majority of its users in the U.S. The company disclosed that, based on current sales and monthly growth levels, it is on pace to top $13.2B in gross merchandise value in the U.S. alone by the end of its second year of operation, far outpacing competitors in this area.
letgo also announced that it now has more mobile active users than any comparable platform, while key engagement measures such as the number of sellers, and messages sent between buyers and sellers in the marketplace are growing between 21% and 40% each month. letgo’s news follows its introduction of innovative new features, including artificial intelligence-based image recognition. It is the first U.S. platform of its kind to incorporate this technology. letgo will also enable user ratings in its free app this month, allowing buyers and sellers to complete transactions with even greater confidence.
“Just last year, letgo was still simply an idea my co-founders – Jordi and Enrique – and I were discussing in our kitchen, but today it’s used by tens of millions of Americans and others globally,” said letgo co-founder Alec Oxenford. “Every day, our team works hard to make letgo the fast, hassle-free, mobile-tailored marketplace that consumers have long wanted, so it’s extremely rewarding to see it catch on so quickly across the U.S. and elsewhere. We continue to add new features and technology to letgo – like artificial intelligence and image recognition – to radically improve how we buy and sell from others locally.”
According to the company, letgo users purchase as many as 100,000 items daily on the platform, and have made over 13M total purchases to date, representing growth of over 393% since the beginning of 2016. letgo users also post over 300,000 items for sale every day. letgo said that the number of messages sent by users within its app has increased by over 559% already this year, with users exchanging over 460M total messages since the platform launched and up to 3.8M messages every day.
letgo’s sleek and streamlined mobile design allows users to post an item for sale in only a few seconds. To make the process even simpler, letgo’s image recognition technology, built on proprietary artificial intelligence, automatically and accurately titles a seller’s listing. letgo also recently added suggested message technology to its in-app chat feature, making negotiations between buyers and sellers even faster.
In the year since its launch, letgo has raised more than $200M from top investors, including Naspers, Accel Partners, Insight Venture Partners, 14W, Eight Roads Ventures, Mangrove Capital Partners, FJ Labs and New Enterprise Associates. It has remained one of the top ranked and most highly rated shopping apps in both the iOS and Android app stores. In May 2016, letgo merged its U.S. operations with Wallapop, with the joint venture operating under letgo’s brand, platform, management and majority ownership.
About letgo:
letgo’s free and highly rated app is the fastest growing mobile marketplace to buy and sell locally. With over 30M downloads, it allows users to post an item for sale in just seconds, and, using cutting-edge image recognition built on proprietary artificial intelligence, letgo even auto-titles sellers’ listings for them. Users can easily browse items for sale in their area, chat instantly and privately with other buyers and sellers nearby and complete transactions with confidence thanks to user ratings. letgo was founded in 2015 by Alec Oxenford and Jordi Castello, with co-founder Enrique Linares joining soon after. Oxenford, an expert and accomplished entrepreneur in ecommerce, previously founded and scaled global online classifieds leader OLX (co-founded by Fabrice Grinda), which has hundreds of millions of active users in India, Brazil, Poland and other growth markets around the world.
letgo is headquartered in the Netherlands, with offices in New York City and Barcelona. For more information, please visit www.letgo.com and download the letgo app for Android and iOS devices.
