Pre-Owned Commerce Has a Trust Problem. Circle Just Raised ₹25 Cr to Solve It

Buying a used phone, camera or piece of furniture online is easy to discover but harder to trust. Bengaluru-based recommerce startup Circle has raised ₹25 crore in seed funding to expand a managed marketplace built around solving exactly that gap — verification, payments and logistics between individual buyers and sellers.

The round was led by Nexus Venture Partners, with participation from existing investors Titan Capital and Myntra cofounder Raveen Sastry. Delhivery COO Ajith Pai also joined as an angel investor. Circle plans to use the capital to move beyond Bengaluru while strengthening AI-powered pricing, product discovery and verification tools, alongside its logistics network and physical Trust Hubs.

Founded in 2025 by Chirag Kataruka and Ankit Misra, Circle does not own the products listed on its platform. Instead, it manages the transaction around them. Sellers can list products ranging from smartphones and gaming consoles to cameras, furniture, watches, handbags and sneakers, while Circle handles elements including pickup, verification, payment and seller payouts. Buyers receive product verification and a three-day guarantee.

The startup claims to have facilitated around ₹25 crore worth of pre-owned goods sales in Bengaluru within its first year. It also says the platform attracted more than 1 million visitors and generated roughly 1 lakh listings, with sellers typically finding buyers within three days. Those figures are company-reported.

Circle previously raised ₹3.4 crore in a pre-seed round led by Titan Capital. It now enters a broader recommerce market that already includes classifieds players such as OLX and Quikr, electronics specialist Cashify and other resale platforms.

The distinction Circle is trying to build is straightforward: rather than simply connecting a stranger who wants to sell with another who wants to buy, it wants to sit in the middle and make the transaction itself more dependable. The ₹25 crore round will now test whether that managed layer can travel beyond its first city.