RV rental startup Outdoorsy raises $25M

San Francisco-based startup Outdoorsy, which offers an outdoor recreation marketplace for road trips and recreational vehicle (RV) adventures, has raised $25M in Series B funding led by Aviva Ventures and Altos Ventures.

Founded in 2015 and headquartered in San Francisco, Outdoorsy is turning the travel industry on its head, having booked over 263,000 days in the last year alone and generated nearly a hundred million dollars through the platform. The company hosts the largest bookable inventory of RVs worldwide online and is rapidly expanding its global fleet towards its goal of mobilizing the more than 17M idle RVs around the world.

The company, which bills itself as the "Airbnb of RVs", explained that more than 12 percent of American households own a recreational vehicle, yet rarely use them.

"At the same time, more than 35 million consumers try to rent a recreational vehicle in America each year with no luck," said Jeff Cavins, co-founder and CEO of Outdoorsy. 'With Outdoorsy, we leveraged this global, cross-cultural phenomenon of RV travel, especially among Millennials, and brought this multi-billion dollar RV industry online and into the sharing economy."

Millennials now make up 38 percent of all recreational vehicle usage in North America as part of the larger trend of experiential travel and the desire to have unique experiences. With 40 percent of its user base being under the age of 40, 17 years younger than the industry average, Outdoorsy is tapping into this new consumer travel trend and building a third lodging category with mobile rooms. Users are able to go where home-sharing sites and hotels cannot go, reaching more places than ever before.

RVs are the perfect gateway experiences for consumers, and the rising demand for rv storage edmonton north and RV travel was a growing trend in which we wanted to invest. Moving this market to an on-demand, online sharing economy was a logical way for us to participate in this new travel market, said Anthony Lee, Managing Director at Altos Ventures.

To create this on-demand marketplace, Outdoorsy utilizes state-of-the-art technology. In its first year in market, it introduced Wheelbase, a free, cloud-based and fully-insured RV fleet and rental management application for any business operating from three to 3,000 units. It also built, distributed and parallelized computation and real-time analytics engines to monitor and report on useful real time data, which promises users privacy and security.

"Our marketplace didn't exist just a few years ago," says Ryan Quinn, co-founder and head of software development. "The platform is a game-changer in this industry and ensures that our users can enjoy ease of use and peace of mind with every interaction." And if you need a highly recommended wolf pack toy hauler, it's recommended that you check used RVs for sale in your area for more details.

Outdoorsy offers a wide range of services besides RV rentals, including on-demand roadside assistance, powerful features such as INSTAmatch and INSTAbook that reduce the time required for searching/booking an RV, automated and integrated DMV verification and the first-ever commercial insurance for peer-to-peer rentals in North America. The insurance offering has now grown to $2M in coverage per rental and is live in the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand.