Peer to peer car rental startup iCarsclub drives away with US$482K from Red Dot Ventures
Red Dot Ventures, a Singapore based incubator under the National Research Foundation’s Technology Incubation Scheme, has recently announced that they have invested S$589,000 (US$482,000) in iCarsclub – a Singapore-based startup providing a marketplace to rent underutilized private cars.
We wrote about iCarsclub back in October 2012. From its initial 20 cars and 100 car rentals, iCarsclub has more than 300 participating cars on their platform, with over 3000 registered members. The peer to peer car sharing platform aims to reach 5000 members and 1000 participating cars in Singapore at the end of the year.
Read also: iCarsclub introduces peer-to-peer car rentals in Singapore
According Eddy Zhang, co-founder and CEO of the startup company, “the city-state is the perfect location to test the model because of the high demand for private cars, the high cost of car ownership — price tags go up to five times of the same cars cost in the US — and the general safety environment, including low theft and accident rates.”
iCarbox – iCarsclub’s own “proprietary technology”
Other than a peer to peer car renting platform, iCarsclub also has developed its own proprietary technology, the iCarBox, to render seamless transactions between owners and renters. The little piece of hardware installed in the car allows the renter to unlock the vehicle’s doors via his or her Smartphone. Co-founder Jamie Wang explains: “Thanks to this technology, owners and renters don’t need to meet. The iCarBox is installed in the vehicle and integrated with the locking system – this means that our central server is then directly connected to the system and can command it via SMS or GPRS. So, when a rental is confirmed, the user clicks on the app’s unlock button on his or her Smartphone, our central sever sends the order to the iCarBox, and the door is automatically unlocked. The same user then gets into the car, finds the ignition keys left in the compartment, and starts driving.”
While iCarBox can be really convenient, it relies a lot on whether the smartphone app works or not. Recently one of our readers George Stevens shared his experience with iCarsclub where he commented that iCarBox did not work. The iCarsclub team responded that the locking system was affected by a bad 3G signal and has since “fixed” the problem.
There seems to be quite a number of activities in the transportation industry in Singapore. Other than iCarsClub, we have also seen US based Uber launching their on-demand private chauffeur service in Singapore. On top of that, Singapore’s first online direct sell platform for car rental companies, Drive.SG, has also closed its seed funding of S$200,000 earlier in January.
Read also: Drive.SG raises S$200K to make renting cars more accessible
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