RVshare recently secured a $50 million commitment from Austin, Texas-based investment firm Tritium Partners, whose managing partners led the first investment in vacation rental HomeAway.
RVshare will initially call down $20 million of the committed capital to accelerate its growth, focusing on enhancements in user experience, marketing, and hiring more talent.
Tritium’s managing partners Phil Siegel and David Lack led the first investment in vacation rental giant HomeAway, where RVshare’s newly announced CEO, Jon Gray, was the third employee and served as a senior executive.
“A $50 million investment from Tritium is an incredible validation of RVshare and its already multi-million-dollar marketplace business that is poised to disrupt an entire industry,” said Gray. “We will reshape the way people think about RVs, turning them into a second source of income for RV owners and broadening the uses for renters from classic family vacations to weekend warriors and overflow accommodations to tailgating.”
With RVshare, which was founded in 2013, Seigel and Lack see the opportunity to redefine a category.
“I led HomeAway’s first investment, and I was there the day they rang the IPO bell on Wall Street and the parallels between HomeAway and RVshare are significant,” said Siegel. “HomeAway, which was ultimately acquired for $3.9 billion by Expedia, took vacation home rentals from a fringe category to a celebrated mainstay of global travel. With a massive lead and substantial funding, we see RVshare doing the same for RV rentals.”
“Up until now, we’ve been able to build RVshare without any outside investment,” said RVshare co-founder and president Joel Clark. “We now have the luxury of raising capital not out of necessity but of an irresistible opportunity to combine Jon’s leadership, the HomeAway investor experience and the capital all at once.”
