Irish car tech startup Fleet App launches £300k crowdfunding campaign

Fleet App has announced a crowd-sourced investment campaign on equity crowdfunding platform Seedrs.

The County Wicklow based car tech company is seeking to raise £300,000 (€350,000) to fuel its next round of international expansion.

The company cut its teeth developing a P2P “Airbnb for cars” platform for ordinary people to hire out their vehicles utilising a first-of-its-kind AXA insurance on-demand insurance model. It has since graduated into an enterprise car hire platform, providing licenced white label services for auto manufacturers and motor groups. The company says that it can deliver an operational, bespoke, fully-branded car hire platform anywhere in the world within 12 weeks.

Fleet recently partnered with Toyota Ireland to launch Toyota Daily Rental, a smartphone app allowing customers to hire vehicles from any of Ireland’s 46 Toyota dealerships. The service has seen steady growth since its soft launch in September on Android and iOS devices.

Key to the app’s early success is its monthly car subscription offering, a model that has seen success in North America. Hirers can avail of car hire by the month with rental, insurance, and maintenance all rolled into a single subscription which can be cancelled or upgraded to a better model as required.

“To date, we’ve achieved remarkable success operating with a small, gifted team of developers. We’re keen to grow our engineering team further and get the right talent which will meet our current pipeline of work and fuel further international expansion,” says Fleet App CEO Maurice Sheehy.

“We’ve chosen Seedrs for the coming investment round because the UK is our initial target market for our international expansion. We are in early-stage discussions with a number of large British motor groups interested in accessing our white label service”.

Fleet previously formed Spark Crowdfunding’s inaugural crowdfunding campaign – Ireland’s first homegrown digital investor platform. The startup used funds raised and Enterprise Ireland’s High-Performance Start-Up program to develop the software for their expansion into enterprise car hire.

Seedrs dubs itself “the UK’s most active investor in private companies”, boasting a portfolio of over £740 million invested in 912 deals funded on its platform. The platform allows bids as low as £11. It has previously hosted successful digital startups such as Revolut and Irish-based peer-to-peer lending company Flender, who recently secured a €75 million funding line to offer loans to Irish businesses.

The Fleet campaign can be viewed at seedrs.com/fleet.