RelayRides, a marketplace that lets car-owners rent out their cars a few hours at a time, has named former Shopping.com chief Andre Haddad as its CEO. The well-funded startup has raised $10 million to date, with investors including Google Ventures, August Capital, and Shasta Ventures.
RelayRides allows users to rent out their cars for select times during the week, and says that renters generate an average of $250 a month in revenue, of which they keep 65% (20% goes to insurance, 15% to RelayRides). Users on the other side of the deal benefit, because it’s generally much cheaper to rent a car through RelayRides than though traditional car rental services). And Haddad has plenty of experience with managing marketplaces — prior to joining Shopping.com, Haddad was SVP of Product at eBay and he founded European auction site iBazar.
RelayRides doesn’t share many specific numbers, but it says to date “thousands of owners have signed up their cars” for renting, and that the service has doubled revenue between June and August 2011 (obviously we don’t know what the revenue was in June, so it’s not clear how big a jump that is).
Alongside the news, the company is announcing that Jim Barnett (founder of Turn, former President of Overture) is joining RelayRide’s board.
RelayRides is a direct competitor with Getaround, which won TechCrunch Disrupt NYC earlier this year.
RelayRides, launched in June 2010, is the world’s first, and leading, peer-to-peer car sharing marketplace. RelayRides connects people who need a car with vehicle owners whose rides would otherwise be sitting idle. Car owners set the price and availability, and RelayRides provides the technology infrastructure and a $1M insurance policy to make the transaction safe and convenient. Riding the building wave of collaborative consumption businesses such as Airbnb, Rent the Runway, and Netflix, RelayRides is reinventing mobility and is...
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