Buying Used Cars In Kenya Is Trouble. This Startup Just Raised USD 11 M To Fix It

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Buying Used Cars In Kenya Is Trouble. This Startup Just Raised USD 11 M To Fix It

In Kenya, buying a second-hand car is one of life’s most high-stakes decisions, and one of its most frustrating. Pricing is opaque, condition reports are scarce, and too often, deals end with unpleasant surprises.

That’s the systemic inefficiency Peach Cars, a Tokyo-founded startup operating in Kenya, is tackling head-on with a data-led marketplace and, as of this week, USD 11 M in new funding.

Led by Suzuki Global Ventures, the Series A also pulled in Japan Bank for International Cooperation and Gohgin Capital, with repeat backing from University of Tokyo Edge Capital Partners (UTEC), which had seeded Peach with USD 5 M in 2023.

The round is one of the largest ever for an African mobility startup at this stage—a sign that investors see an opportunity to rebuild the region’s vehicle trade on a foundation of transparency, automation, and trust.

Launched in 2020 by Kaoru Kaganoi and Zachary Petroni, Peach Cars integrates a proprietary 225-point inspection engine with real-time appraisal and embedded finance tools.

Its platform lets Kenyan car buyers and sellers trade directly, without middlemen and with visibility into every detail of a vehicle’s history.

That includes preliminary credit scoring for instant financing decisions and after-sales service, a suite of features that feel familiar to anyone who’s ever shopped for a car in Japan but remain rare in Africa.

“Our mission is to make sure everyone, whether spending $4,000 or $40,000, gets a delightful, transparent experience,” Kaganoi famously said when the prior seed round was announced. That ethos resonates with investors like Suzuki, which dominates India’s car market and now sees Africa as its next frontier.

Peach’s ambitions go beyond being a classified ads platform. Revenues come from transaction fees, inspection services, handovers, and auto loans.

Its long-term vision is to become the connective tissue for an ecosystem spanning logistics, parts procurement, maintenance, and financing—an end-to-end “infrastructure of trust,” as Kaganoi calls it.

With this new capital, Peach plans to scale its team and expand across Kenya and into other East and Sub-Saharan countries.

That means standing up more regional inspection hubs, launching new logistics and parts services, and reinforcing the tech behind its AI-driven transaction engine.

Investors like JBIC see the startup as part of a broader pattern of emerging-market mobility companies solving real-world pain points with software built for the region.

In an industry long dogged by opacity and informal networks, Peach Cars’ big bet is that African consumers deserve better. The company is laying tracks to make that happen, one transaction at a time.