RentoMojo raises $10 million in Series-B funding

BENGALURU: Consumer leasing platform RentoMojo has secured $10 million in series-B funding from Bain Capital Ventures and former Lending Club CEO Renaud Laplanche, who invested in a personal capacity. Existing investors Accel Partners and IDG Ventures also participated in the round.

"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). "RentoMojo is very focused on the needs of the Indian market."

RentoMojo raises lease capital from financial institutions for products rented to consumers for long periods.It has 25,000 subscribers and leases about 14,000 products every month, including furniture, appliances and bikes.

Geetansh Bamania, chief executive of RentoMojo, said the funds will be used for maturing the product and building a good credit scoring algorithm, improving user experience, as well as building a strong team by hiring at the leadership level.


"We are also open to looking at acquisitions if we see intrinsic value," Bamania said. He said the startup plans to enter new categories for leasing over the next few months, but did not give any details. RentoMojo had earlier raised $7 million in two rounds from Accel and IDG.

This is BCV's first investment in a startup in the country that is focused on the domestic market. The venture capital arm of US-based alternative investment firm Bain Capital had earlier invested in software companies founded in India but addressing the US or global markets. Pune-based ScaleArc, for instance. BCV's investment in RentoMojo was done from the $600-million fund it had closed last year. Deshpande, who was a series-A investor in US-based peer-to-peer lending company Lending Club, will join RentoMojo's board.

"We were also impressed by RentoMojo's team. The company has almost perfected a unique model where they can get customers furniture, appliances and vehicles, while also securitising these assets and selling the cashflow to institutions," Deshpande said.

While Bain Capital has offices in India and has made a number of investments in the country, BCV will not have a base here immediately.

Deshpande said he reached out to Laplanche to look at the Indian startup as he saw similarities between the two founders. "When I met Geetansh, he reminded me a lot of Renaud 10-15 years ago... He had a good understanding of the market, a narrow focus on what he was doing and a broad vision of how it will be applicable. I asked Renaud to meet Geetansh," Deshpande said. "Given Renaud's experience in founding and operating Lending Club, in effect creating the P2P lending industry, I could not think of a better person to partner with, to help RentoMojo become a very big business capable of changing the lives of millions of people."

This funding also marks Laplanche's first investment in India, according to Deshpande. Laplanche, who last year left Lending Club following a loan malpractice scandal, recently started another lending company, Upgrade.

"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," Laplanche said in a statement.