Consumer leasing startup RentoMojo raises $10 mn in Series B round

Bengaluru-based consumer leasing platform RentoMojo has secured $10 million in its series-B round of funding led by Bain Capital.

Former Lending Club CEO Renauld Laplanche invested in personal capacity while existing investors of RentoMojo, Accel Partners and IDG Ventures also participated in the funding round.

The fresh capital will provide much-needed scale to RentoMojo's leasing programme. It will use the funds towards marketing, branding, hiring and increasing its products catalogue as reported to Mint.

RentoMojo is a marketplace, which offers furniture, furnishings, appliances, trekking equipment and bikes at affordable rentals. It has 25,000 subscribers and leases about 14,000 products every month, including furniture, appliances and bikes.

With frequent city immigrations, it becomes expensive to buy high-cost furniture and sell them later. This rental pattern conveniently solves the problem. Thus their service is pitched as an alternative to buying home durables.

Founded by IIT Alumnus Geetansh Bamania in November 2014, RentoMojo raises lease capital from financial institutions for products rented to consumers for long periods.

“We are looking at the India opportunity in two categories ­ Indian companies going after the local market, and those based in India but chasing global markets,“ said Salil Deshpande, managing director of Bain Capital Ventures (BCV).

The latest funding marks the debut for both BCV's and Laplanche in the country.

Commenting on investment in India Laplanche said,“In the past 10 years, I've met more than a hundred companies implementing some variation of marketplaces for credit, lease, or rental in some region of the world. RentoMojo is hands down the most impressive I've seen in terms of clarity of vision and business model, early execution that already generates amazing economic returns and a pretty straight path to making it a very big business capable of changing the lives of millions of people.“

RentoMojo funding history:

Prior to this RentoMojo has raised $2 million in Pre-Series A and $5 million in Series A from Accel Partners and IDG Ventures, India.  Before that, the startup raised angel funding from Snapdeal’s former Chief Product Officer Anand Chandrasekaran, GSF India founder Rajesh Sawhney, and other angel investors.