Outdoorsy recently announced it has raised $25 million 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.
Founded in 2015 and headquartered in San Francisco, Outdoorsy has booked more than 263,000 days in rental time in the last year, generating nearly $100 million through the platform, according to the company. The company said it is rapidly expanding its global fleet towards its goal of mobilizing the more than 17 million idle RVs around the world.
“More than 12 percent of American households own an RV, yet rarely use it,” said Jeff Cavins, co-founder and CEO of Outdoorsy. “At the same time, more than 35 million consumers try to rent an RV 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 RV usage in North America. 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 consumer travel trend.
“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 RV market needs to be using Outdoorsy and its pro tools across their operations.”
In its first year in market, Outdoorsy 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.
Outdoorsy offers on-demand roadside assistance, INSTAmatch and INSTAbook that reduces the time required for searching/booking an RV, automated and integrated DMV verification, and commercial insurance for peer-to-peer rentals in North America.
The insurance offering has now grown to $2 million in coverage per rental, and is live in the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Further, the company recently announced a strategic partnership with Kampgrounds of America to bring camping assets and locations into the Outdoorsy marketplace and introduced an Active Duty Service and Military Veteran Program that waives listing and rental fees for service members.
