The Green Lane Digital co-founded and funded startup Bloodstock.com.au has sold to leading thoroughbred auction house Inglis group. The business will remain under its Bloodstock.com.au branding, but was acquired by Inglis to complement its existing offline auctions business. All Bloodstock.com.au employees have been retained and have now moved out of the Green Lane Digital incubation office in North Sydney and over to Inglis premises in Randwick, Sydney. There is no earn out period and the deal was finalised late last week. All other aspects of the deal are confidential.
Seeing a gap in the online market for thoroughbred sales, Bloodstock.com.au was founded by Peter Watson, Andrew Kesper and Green Lane Digital in 2009 as an online classifieds site for selling thoroughbred racehorses. The website quickly grew to become the leading thoroughbred classifieds website in Australia with more than 60,000 website visits per month and over 8,000 horse listings since it launched.
In Bloodstock.com.au’s early days Green Lane Digital’s David Kowalski and Alex Sparkes took an active role in starting up and building the business. This included: designing the overall business strategy, website, operations, sales plan and rollout strategy. David and Alex were able to rely on their extensive classifieds experience at CountryCars when designing the core website and operations of the business. One of the key drivers of the early growth of the startup was the websites technology, clean classifieds listings and interactive horse profiles. As the startup took shape management, sales and admin staff were brought on to run the business, at which point Green Lane Digital could step out of the day to day running of the business.
“Bloodstock was really appealing from the outset to Green Lane Digital due to the highly specific nature of the industry and the opportunity for local and international growth. We are always on the lookout for investment opportunities that present niche market growth, whilst at the same time displaying global potential” said Alex Sparkes of Green Lane Digital.
The startup is another great example of developing a startup business into an early trade sale. The success here involved finding a gap in a high potential existing market and developing an online business using modern technology which changed industry behaviour and disrupted the market. At the point of sale Bloodstock.com.au has: a well recognised brand in the industry, a high traffic website with good underlying technology, an experienced and skilled team of staff, quickly growing online sales taking market share from offline players and a lot of potential for growth. This is what made Bloodstock.com.au such an attractive acquisition target.
