Outdoorsy

I do not see any scenario where we would offer our coach up for rent. We have way too much money invested in our coach and it is a surprisingly complex machine to operate safely. That said, if we had a trailer that sat unused most of the time, we might consider being part of Outdoorsy.

Outdoorsy is a sharing economy technology startup. It connects owners of RVs with potential renters. If you are interested in renting an RV at a certain location, you can jump on their site and see if there are any available RVs, everything from trailers to motorcoaches.

Outdoorsy just raised $25 million in Series B funding from several venture capital firms.

Here is part of their press release:

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 12, 2018 /PRNewswire/ — Outdoorsy, the world’s fastest-growing outdoor recreation marketplace, powering road trips and recreational vehicle (RV) adventures, today announced it has raised $25M USD in Series B funding led by Aviva Ventures and Altos Ventures. Aviva and Altos are joined by existing investors Tandem Capital and Autotech Ventures. The Series B funding will be used to expand the company’s sales and marketing efforts, broaden its geographic footprint and grow its engineering and product teams.

Outdoorsy is tapping into a 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.

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.

“More than 12 percent of American households own a recreational vehicle, yet rarely use it,” said Jeff Cavins, co-founder and CEO of Outdoorsy. “At the same time, more than 35Mconsumers try to rent a recreational vehicle in America each year with no luck. 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 campervan 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.

“Every on-demand agency in the recreational vehicle market needs to be using Outdoorsy and its pro tools across their operations,” continued Lee. “Outdoorsy built the first solution that definitively shows the world’s largest enterprises down to the at home operator, that they can list and rent safely, while enjoying peace of mind and economic benefits that were never before possible.”

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.”