Fleequid, the first online marketplace built for buying and selling used buses, has raised €3 million in Seed funding.
The bus resale market is surprisingly large, over 100,000 buses change hands every year in Europe alone. Yet, until now, the process remains slow, fragmented and offline.
Buses typically start in Northern Europe, moving south and changing owners three to four times during their lifespan.
Countries like Italy, Poland, Germany, and Spain, with strong tourism sectors and large rural areas, rely heavily on these vehicles. But despite the market’s size, the process of buying and selling buses is still stuck in the past.
Most owners don’t know how to sell or who to sell to. Instead, they go straight to brokers: middlemen who operate in an opaque system full of hidden mark-ups.
That’s the problem brothers Filippo and Federico Battaglia set out to solve when they launched Fleequid at the end of 2024. After more than a decade working in their family’s bus trading company Basco, the two saw a huge opportunity to bring speed and trust to an industry that badly needs both.
Fleequid replaces backroom deals and long email chains with a single platform where sellers can list their vehicles and buyers can compete in open online auctions.
Every bus comes with a full dossier: photos, videos, condition reports, technical inspection, all verified by Fleequid’s expert team. And once a deal is made, Fleequid takes care of the entire transaction, from payment to ownership transfer and transport..
“We’ve been in this world for 13 years,” said co-founder Filippo Battaglia.
“We know the players, we know the pain points, and we know how much value is lost in the current system. We built Fleequid to change that.
We used to say no to 90 per cent of buses at Basco because we didn’t have a scalable way to resell them. Now, we can say yes to all of them.”
In its first months, Fleequid sold hundreds of buses. Buyers placed bids from Ghana, Romania, and Iraq to core EU markets such as Italy, Poland, and Bulgaria. The need for a more efficient, trusted solution is clearly global.
DFF Ventures led the round, with participation from other global funds: Silence VC, FJ Labs, and angel investor Jack Greco (co-founder of ACV Auctions).
“We look for sharp founders tackling big problems in under-digitized markets,” said Maarten Engelen, Partner at DFF.
“The Battaglia brothers are insiders who’ve decided to disrupt their own industry, and they’ve done it with the kind of execution and grit we love to back.
Fleequid is not just a better way to trade buses. It’s the start of a new operating system for the entire sector.”
This marks DFF’s second investment in Italy and the first for Silence and FJ.
With this new round of funding, Fleequid plans to accelerate its rollout across Europe, further develop its technology, so companies can trade buses with the speed of clicking ‘buy now.’
Lead image: Fleequid. Photo: uncredited.
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