Online auction house Catawiki (Benaulim B.V) has raised $82 million Series C in a round led by Lead Edge Capital that included previous investors Accel Partners and Project A Ventures, along with a number of former Booking.com executives, including former Chief Marketing Officer Arthur Kosten.

Founded in 2008, Catawiki is an online catalogue and auction house for collectibles, and hosts over 40 weekly auctions in categories including comic books, coins, stamps, art, model trains, wine, vinyl records, jewellery, ceramics, books, and others.

Its biggest categories currently are jewellery, art, classic cars and watches, and recent sales have included a strand of Napoleon’s hair, a Tyrannosaurus Rex jaw, the first Tintin comic, a Jaguar E-Type convertible and a bottle of 1975 Romanée-Conti Grand Cru.

As well as offering a specialized service, Catawiki also differs in providing category experts that act as auctioneers who curate and oversee weekly auctions, a service which the company claims results in sellers achieving higher prices than they would achieve on other websites, with buyers likewise purchasing higher quality, more authentic goods.

Based in the Netherlands, the numbers for the site are impressive, with revenues up 300 percent in 2015 vs the same period in 2014, along with doubling of its number of auction categories, as well as now selling over 15,000 lots of collectables per week.

In the last year it has also expanded further afield, launching dedicated sites for Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom.

“Our traction over the last year shows that people are seeking a new and better way to buy and sell their unique objects,” Chief Executive Officer René Schoenmakers said in a statement sent to SiliconANGLE. “We have grown exceptionally fast while not spending much money from the last funding round.”

Quality niche

Catawiki has been compared to eBay in the past, and while there’s no question that what it does definitely crosses over into the services that eBay provides, it’s more of a high-quality niche service that specializes in collectables and support around their sale versus eBay’s vanilla, one size fits all model, that defines what they are doing.

Not everyone is into collectables, or can afford to be (1975 Romanée-Conti Grand Cru…OMG,) but those that are take the hobby, or as is often the case, obsession, seriously, and that’s the market Catawiki is catering for, and doing a good job of it at that.

Including the new round Catawiki has raised $94.8 million to-date.

The company said it would use the new round to raise it head count and expand further across Europe, and eventually further afield.

Image credit: screenshot/ Catawiki