As the pandemic set in last spring, millions of people stopped booking flights, canceled travel plans and started looking up places to camp, hike and explore without bursting their quarantine bubbles. And little by little, they ventured further out, slowly reviving a few pockets of the travel industry.
Austin- and Akron, Ohio-based RVshare, founded in 2013, has been well-positioned to absorb the demand. In September, it reported it had hit a milestone of 2 million days booked on its platform. Now, as it looks for a continued boom in RV use, the startup says it has raised a $100 million-plus funding round led by KKR, along with existing investor Tritium Partners. That brings its total funding to nearly $150 million.
RVshare's platform works a bit like Airbnb. Travelers can select a pickup location, travel dates and vehicle size. Meanwhile, RV owners can post available vehicles, which include travel trailers, fifth wheels, motorhomes and high-end Class A motorhomes.
The startup was formed in Akron by co-founders Mark Jenney and Joel Clark. In 2018, it named former HomeAway Chief Revenue Officer Jon Gray as its CEO and opened an Austin office, later adding HomeAway co-founders Brian Sharples and Carl Shepherd to its board of directors, along with Southwest Airlines CMO Kevin Krone. It currently has 75 employees, with 15 of them in Austin.
While it has recently been booming, RVshare was all but shutdown in March as the pandemic set in. The company cut 10% of its workforce and furloughed another 30%, shifting its focus to providing RVs for frontline workers who needed to stay away from their families to prevent possible Covid-19 infections.
But since April, it's been mostly a growth story for RVshare. In mid-April, bookings increased 4x in Texas as it partially reopened. It said in September that bookings for fall were up 123% year-over-year.
“RVs are the preferred accommodation for the more than 40 million US households that go camping each year," Ben Pederson, principal with KKR's Technology Growth team, said in a news release. "Younger generations of travelers are discovering and embracing domestic travel and RVshare is providing a seamless marketplace experience where RV owners can share their passion for camping and unlock the value of their assets.”
The company also has competition from traditional RV dealers, as well as San Francisco-based Outdoorsy, which has raised about $75 million.
“At RVshare, our mission is to expand the definition of travel, providing a unique, seamless experience that will allow travelers to build lifelong memories with loved ones,” Gray said in a statement. “I am very proud of our employees and thankful to our customers for helping build RVshare into the market leader it is today – and we are only at the beginning of where our business can go."
