Great Going Rental Market!

 An Overview of GrabOnRent and its funding round

Bangalore-based on-demand product rental platform, GrabOnRent lately raises an undisclosed amount of funding in Pre-Series A round, which was led by IvyCap Ventures and Unicorn India Ventures. GrabOnRent was founded in 2015 by three IIT-Guwahati graduates, Manish S. Sugandhi, Shubham Jain and Aditya Sharma with an aim to provide accessibility of the products to everybody irrespective of their capacity to buy it.

The investment was done under IvyCap Ventures Trust Fund II. With this Prayag Mohanty, vice-president at IvyCap Ventures, and Bhaskar Majumdar, managing partner at Unicorn India Ventures will be a part of the board of GrabOnRent Internet Pvt. Ltd.

GrabOnRent is all about renting products online across eight categories that includes furniture, appliances, event supplies  (lights, sound systems, etc), bicycles, cameras, gaming consoles, party items (hukka, barbeque, etc.) and adventure gear. It also offers renting of cool gadgets such as Pebble Smartwatch, Kindle e-book readers and Hoverboards. Moreover, you can buy the product for trial for minimum amount.  Currently, the platform has more than 2600 active consumers. Furlenco and Rentomojo gives direct competition to GrabOnRent.

The Indian market is still not open to renting products. GrabOnRent takes the initiative to educate and empower suppliers to exhibit their products to a much larger audience via its platform. In turn, it will help the vendors to get rid of logistic problems and avail secure payments along with insurance.

Using the funds

The startup plans to utilize the funds in product development and customer acquisition. Moreover, a fraction of the funds will be used to acquire superior- quality merchants on the platform.

Words of Wisdom from the Co-founder to Inc.42

“We are also looking to invest in technology to track our metrics, CSAT i.e. customer satisfaction score (currently 81) and to measure and improve the product health score, which includes tracking complaints to help discard the defective products. Renting as a concept is not as famous as ecommerce, food delivery or cab services. That was the biggest challenge that we have faced and I think we face it even today. But with effective communication and marketing, it will be a good challenge to solve” said Shubham Jain.

“The major focus of the company is to generate awareness towards the viability of renting products. One doesn’t need to scratch their heads 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,” said Manish Sugandhi.

Takeaways:-

• Bangalore-based on-demand product rental platform, GrabOnRent lately raises an undisclosed amount of funding in Pre-Series A round, which was led by IvyCap Ventures and Unicorn India Ventures.
• GrabOnRent is all about renting products online across eight categories that includes furniture, appliances, event supplies, bicycles, cameras, gaming consoles, party items and adventure gear.
• The startup plans to utilize the funds in product development and customer acquisition.