InMotion Ventures has participated in a $12m Series A round for Bumper, a UK-based startup providing buy now pay later (BNPL) services for car repair financing. The round was led by Autotech Ventures and we are joined by Porsche Ventures.
Louis Fearn, Associate at InMotion Ventures, explores why we invested.
Market Landscape:
Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) is the fastest growing online payment method globally, widely used across many sectors. Despite this shift in consumer preference, the automotive sector has been slow to react.
The automotive aftersales market is vast: worth £90bn per year in Europe and a staggering £620bn worldwide. With new car registrations at their lowest level for two decades demand for financing options on repairs is on the rise, yet interest-free, split payment options are few and far between.
Bumper and their BNPL model are perfectly poised to become market leaders in this sector ripe for disruption. The size of the industry combined with low levels of penetration, and the scope to improve margins as the business scales, provide Bumper with an exciting opportunity to capture the whole European franchise market over the next five years.
What Bumper does:
Founded in 2013 by Jack Allman and James Jackson, Bumper offers an interest-free digital payment platform for vehicle repairs and services, enabling owners to spread costs and better afford necessary repairs. The founding team acknowledged the poor user experience of applying for a repair loan, with dealerships also losing out as only 40% of identified repairs are sold.
Bumper’s purpose-built risk engine offers a simple alternative to unexpected car repairs. Their machine learning-enabled automotive scorecard studies hundreds of vehicle and consumer data points on every applicant to make highly accurate lending decisions. This rigorous credit checking offers merchants and dealerships a level of security previously unseen in the industry.
Customers can split bills and authorise repairs in seconds via a fully automated digital process. This streamlined approach removes the need for uncomfortable price negotiations and allows customers to purchase repairs at an affordable rate.
Automotive partners are given the opportunity to capture additional aftersales revenue by increasing repair conversion rates and reducing the impact of discounting. The platform also has the potential to offer OEMs the chance to upsell high margin products like car accessories.
Why we invested:
Investing in digital services is a core focus for us at InMotion. We firmly believe that the future of the customer experience lies in a full-service approach, with new technologies presenting a tremendous opportunity for OEMs to drive brand loyalty.
Today more than 60% of the top franchised UK dealer groups utilise Bumper’s payment platform, and the team have helped over 100,000 drivers fund servicing and repair bills. As a result of this impressive growth, Bumper was named the eighth fastest-growing European fintech by the Financial Times in 2021.
In the digital era we now live in, service quality is an increasingly important factor for luxury OEM brands. Jaguar Land Rover’s partnership with Bumper is a good example of how working with companies that challenge the status quo can lead to better customer outcomes and improve customer lifetime value for brands.
The Global Financial Services team at Jaguar Land Rover have been working closely with Bumper since 2020 and have been impressed by their market leading product. Ian Durston, commercial director of global financial services at Jaguar Land Rover, says:
“As part of our commitment to giving customers the best possible experience when driving a Jaguar or Land Rover vehicle we wanted to make sure service payments are as flexible and convenient to manage as possible. Bumper fully met this brief, and our partnership has gone from strength to strength in the UK.”
With this Series A round, Bumper have an exceptional lead investor in Autotech Ventures and we’re delighted to be once again investing alongside Porsche Ventures. We are excited to support Bumper’s journey, starting with taking their car repair financing platform to a host of new EU markets early this year.
We’re always interested to speak to exciting and transformative companies within the space, so if you are a founder, or know a company in the space, please do get in touch with me or the InMotion Ventures team, either on LinkedIn or via investments@inmotionventures.com