Self driving car rental company Revv has raised $9 million in Series A equity funding led by Edelweiss Private Equity and and debt funding from Mahindra & Mahindra Financial Services. Revv will tie up with LeasePlan India for vehicle leasing. It will use the funds for expanding into new cities, launching new products and investing in technology for customer experience.
Revv had previously received angel funding from Gautam Kumra, Rajat Dhawan and Ananth Narayanan. The company was founded by Anupam Agarwal and Karan Jain in July 2015 and currently lets users rent cars like Maruti Celerio, Swift, Ford Aspire, Honda City, Nissan Sunny, Mahindra XUV and Audi Q3 etc on hourly and on distance basis. It operates in Delhi NCR, Bangalore, Chandigarh and Hyderabad and claims that over 50% of its revenue comes from repeat users.
Unlike Zoomcar, Revv says that it does not have any user facing parking lots from where cars can be picked up. Instead, it offers a pickup after use and delivery before use to the user’s house or preferred location. It claims to have new (months old) cars with All India Travel Permits (except Leh Ladakh and “areas affected by civil unrest”; read more on why here) on its platform and its charges are inclusive of taxes and insurance along with “as is use” fuel. However, like Zoomcar, the refundable deposit and liability to a user is limited to Rs 5,000.
In April this year, the company appointed Chetan Jain as its Hyderabad CEO. Jain joined the Gurgaon based company from rival Myles where he was the head of operations for Hyderabad and Visakhapatnam. At the time, Revv said that Jain would expand operations in Hyderabad and reach a fleet size of 1,000 cars in the next few months.
Competition:
Revv competes startups like JustRide, a self-drive car rental marketplace, which raised $3 million in bridge funding last month. Another startup Myles claims to have 1,200 cars in 250 locations in the country, with plans to expand to 50,000 in the next 4 years. In self drive car rentals in India, Zoomcar is the most funded company. In August this year, Zoomcar raised $24 million from Ford Smart Mobility LLC with participation from existing investors for scaling its Zoomcar Associate Program, the marketplace model and on technology. Last month, Zoomcar also added new hardware to help preventing road accidents through a Mobileye ADAS system.
