GrabOnRent, the largest on-demand product rental marketplace in India, today announced that it has raised pre-series A funding from the IvyCamp platform. IvyCap Ventures is a lead investor in this round with Unicorn India Ventures participating as co-investors. Founded in September 2015, the company is an early mover in this space and focuses on connecting rental product suppliers with consumers facilitating product discovery, quality assurance, smooth payments and logistics support through the platform which otherwise is cumbersome in the offline rental industry.
GrabOnRent helps users rent products across categories like furniture, appliances, cameras, adventure gear and even helps event planners by providing event supplies on rent. The young company also enables renting of cool gadgets such as Pebble Smartwatch, Kindle e-book readers and Hoverboards. It believes that having access to products is more useful than ownership of the product. Renting as a solution helps customers who are looking to use products for a shorter or unsure duration. Also, it provides an end-user to try a product before buying at a fraction of the cost. With rising and unstable economy, renting forms an integral part of sharing economy and is set to shape the future economy.
The founding team comprises of three IIT Guwahati graduates who have worked across firms like Flipkart Logistics and Hewlett Packard. The core team has strong capabilities across product, technology and operations. The funding is primarily for aggressive customer and vendor acquisition along with further product development.
Speaking on the occasion, Shubham Jain, Co-founder and CEO of GrabOnRent said, “Consumer facing businesses are hard to build but with a huge influx of people in the urban areas, the target segment for GrabOnRent is strengthening ever since. Lending and sharing is natural, but it is limited to households. GrabOnRent envisions to extend alternate usage methods to its consumers who do not want to hold too many assets. Accessibility to products is the king."
In India, the product rental industry is extremely disorganized. There are offline players who rent used-goods but are yet to look at renting as a viable earning alternative to selling. The platform educates and empowers such vendors to make their products available to a much larger audience via the GrabOnRent platform. The GrabOnRent platform helps them in reducing logistical hassles and enables secure payments along with offering financing and insurance options.
Shubham highlighted the latent demand in the consumer market. He says, "The major focus of the company is to generate awareness towards viability of renting products. One doesn't need to scratch their head in deciding in favor of renting against buying if the duration of usage is limited. Our suppliers are quick to adapt to our technologies and we foresee more suppliers joining the platform in the coming months."
“We got connected with GrabOnRent through the IvyCamp platform, we know the rental market is a very large opportunity, and we believe GrabOnRent has created a differentiated business model to address this market segment. It helps that several macro factors that have converged today make this business attractive – be it a highly mobile urban demographic that is the initial target market or even the increasing comfort levels with online transactions in general. All this, coupled with GrabOnRent unique team strengths and capabilities, have been continuously reflected in the company’s growth since inception, and we are excited to partner with them in the next phase of this journey. This is amongst the first few investments of IvyCap Ventures Trust Fund II and forms part of our early stage strategy, through which we have allocated INR 60 Cr. for early stage investments via the IvyCamp platform.” said Vikram Gupta, Founder and Managing Partner of IvyCap Ventures. “In addition, we are also looking forward to adding significant value to GrabOnRent through our network of relationships.”
Bhaskar Majumdar Managing Partner at Unicorn India Ventures said “We have been observing and interacting with the GrabOnRent team and seen them develop their business proposition for over six months. As a thesis, Unicorn believes in the shared economy and we see this trend growing larger in India given the macro-environment and the demography. As always, we shall be integrally involved in scaling up the business which we feel can take multiple dimensions”.
