Nabobil, a Norwegian P2P car rental marketplace which launched 4 months ago, just closed a seed investment round of $600K. The fresh capital comes from a group of angel investors including a former McKinsey Director (names were not disclosed). It will be used to expand to another country soon and to launch a new app.
Only within the few months of its existence, the young company already counts over 1,500 active cars and more than 12,000 registered users. Nabobil was also able to “steal” Even Heggernes, former Country Manager for the Nordics/UK from Airbnb. He is now the CEO of the company.
Nabobil launched on the 8th of September last year even though they didn’t have a polished product. The founding team aimed to be first to market in Norway since they knew of one competitor aiming to launch in the same time as well. It worked. According to the Nabobil team, the company grew faster than expected.
The problem Nabobil aims to solve: There’s about 2,5 million private cars in Norway and most of them are idle cars that stands still 23 out of 24 hours a day. Nabobil lets owners of these cars monetize that idle time by renting them out on an hourly or daily basis to people in their neighbourhood (Nabobil means neighbor’s car in Norwegian). According to the startup, it’s zero risk for the car owners through Nabobil’s insurance policy.
Car owners retain 80% of the rental revenue and 20% goes to cover insurance and administrative costs. The main competitors of Nabobil are Danish GoMore, French Drivy and Dutch Snappcar. That being said, it will be interesting to see which country Nabobil will choose for its upcoming expansion.
