Online renting platform RentSher secures $300K seed funding, plans to expand to new cities
After completing one year, online renting platform RentSher has raised more than $300, 000 in seed funding. The round was led by ex-McKinsey investor Vaibhav Doshi along with other entrepreneurs-turned-investors including Abhay Singhal, Co-founder of In Mobi; Vibhu Garg, Co-founder and COO, Unicommerce; Joby Babu, COO, Nimbuzz; Abhishek Acharya, GM, Philips India and Manish Shah of Wipro, UK.
Launched in December 2014 by alumni of IIT Delhi and Oxford University – Abhijit Shaha, Harsh Dhand and Karandeep S Vohra – RentSher is a horizontal marketplace for rental products. It is currently operational in Bangalore and Delhi.
The funds will be used in equal parts for product development, fulfilment and growth. With the funding, the platform aims to expand its reach to new cities and strengthen its operation in existing cities. The platform says that the goal here is to build scalable yet sustainable operations in each city rather than spreading too thin.
“Our strong supply side and operations capability have enabled us to fulfil even large orders of events where thousands appeared. Our vision is to develop RentSher into a platform that is at the intersection of sharing and on-demand economy with products delivered as and when our customers need them,” says Harsh Dhand, CEO, RentSher.
He adds that he is building a strong team focused on sustaining 30-40 percent month-on-month growth that will enable the platform to reach 1000 orders per month this quarter itself and double it by next quarter.
The concept of sharing idle products and services with others using peer-to-peer services has given birth to a new kind of economy. Uber and Ola are prime examples of success in this kind of collaborative economy.
According to the latest PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PWC) report, this collaborative economy has the potential to increase global revenues from around $15 billion now to $335 billion by 2025.
Besides RentSher, many other players like RentSetGo, GrabOnRent, RentoMojo and Rentomo are running the business in different categories.
The mushrooming of renting platforms with an increasing faith of investors rest in the category. Experts believe that the country like India with low per capita income, the idea of sharing economy can have a sustainable future.
