Seven years before Motorway existed, Tom Leathes, Harry Jones and Alex Buttle already knew what it felt like to sell a company. In 2010 uSwitch bought Top10, the broadband and mobile comparison site the three had built. That first exit is the quiet fact under everything that followed.
Top10 was a lesson in a particular kind of market: one where the customer is confused, the middlemen are comfortable and the price is hidden. The founders had spent years inside that confusion. When they looked for the next one, they landed on something far larger and more emotional than a mobile tariff. The family car.
The idea was a flip: the seller photographs the car once, and thousands of verified dealers bid against each other in a private auction.
Selling a used car in Britain was, and often still is, a small humiliation. You type your registration into a website, get a number, drive to a branch, and watch the offer shrink. Motorway's own research later found online offers ran on average about 6 per cent above what sellers actually received.
So in July 2017 the three started again. They did not rush to the big cheques. A GBP 500,000 angel round came first, then GBP 2.75m of seed money from LocalGlobe and Marchmont Ventures in 2018, and GBP 11m in 2019. The idea was a flip: the seller photographs the car once, and thousands of verified dealers bid against each other in a private auction. The dealer, not the seller, takes on the hassle.
What the outside world did not see was how fragile a marketplace is at the start. A buyer-side network of dealers means nothing without cars, and cars mean nothing without dealers. Then, in March 2020, the UK locked down and Motorway stopped trading altogether. It restarted in May with contact-free collection.
The pandemic then helped. A chip shortage pushed used-car prices up, sellers wanted a safe, quick route, and by the third quarter of 2021 sales had risen 300 per cent to $411m. Index Ventures led a GBP 48m round in June 2021, and in November came a $190m round with ICONIQ Growth at a valuation above $1bn. About 4,000 dealers were on the platform. Leathes told TechCrunch that eight thousand cars a month was still under one per cent of the UK market.
The price of that speed has been money. Motorway reported revenue of about GBP 66m for 2023/24 against a loss of GBP 37.3m for 2024, and has said it expects to turn profitable in 2026.
For a first-time founder the interesting part is the order of events. The three did not begin with a vision of a unicorn. They began with a product that had worked once, a sale that gave them credibility, and a market where people were quietly being short-changed.