Skurt, a startup that delivers rental cars to you, just raised a $1.3 million seed round from Upfront Ventures, Hipmunk CEO Adam Goldstein, Wonga founder Errol Damelin, Whisper President Mark Troughton and GoodRx Co-founder Scott Marlette.
Skurt has agreements with independent car rental companies that have an excess inventory of cars in need of renters. The startup’s partners have fleets ranging in size from local mom-and-pop shops with 200 cars to larger independent rental companies with over 2,000 cars. Skurt currently has access to over 5,000 in Los Angeles, Skurt co-founder Harry Hurst told TechCrunch in an email. The service, which picks you up and takes you to your rental car, is currently only available at LAX in Los Angeles. Skurt plans to launch at SFO in San Francisco soon.
“I’ve never met a customer who loves their rental car company because it’s dominated by three big companies who over charge and have poor service,” Upfront Ventures Managing Partner Mark Suster told TechCrunch in an email. “We met the Skurt team and were impressed with their disruptive approach to this $24 billion US market. What Uber did to the taxi market we think Skurt can do to rental cars.”
Skurt isn’t the first startup to try to tackle the car rental space. Getaround, a startup with revenue in the tens of millions of dollars, offers peer-to-peer car rentals in 11 cities across the nation. In total, Getaround has a fleet of a little over 1,600 cars available for rental. Already, Skurt has more cars available than Getaround. That being said, I use Getaround in San Francisco and haven’t had any problems when it comes to availability, so I asked Skurt co-founder Josh Mangel why I should ditch Getaround when Skurt becomes available in San Francisco.
“With us, the experience is consistent every time,” Mangel told me. “The car is brought right to you and picked up from wherever you are, on demand. Although they offer a great service for short journeys, our prices are going to end up being significantly less expensive in most cases, if not all.”
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