Thai startup wants to make peer-to-peer car rental a reality, raises funding

Cars are sitting idle in parking lots all day long. What if they can be better used? That’s the premise of Drivemate, a Thai startup that lets you rent cars from fellow car owners.

The startup has just announced raising a seed round worth “mid-to-high six-digit sum” in US dollars from 500 Startups’ Thailand fund 500 Tuk Tuks and Thai telco Dtac’s startup incubator Dtac Accelerate.

The concept is not new. The US has Turo, which raised a total of US$193 million in funding. It has 171,000 vehicles and four million registered users, though there’s no word on whether the business is sustainable.

China has Start (formerly PPzuche), though its Singapore arm iCarsClub appears to be inactive.

When asked how Drivemate is better than iCarsClub, Sompoat Chansomboon, managing director of Dtac Accelerate, tells Tech in Asia that Drivemate is counting on the market opportunity in Thailand to succeed.

Drivemate co-founder Silratth Sukwatthanasiri adds that the service offers car delivery, which means car owners will drive the vehicle to the location of the renter. Even if the car owner is unavailable, a drivemate staff can take over.

Still, the startup faces a steep climb. While it claims to have no direct competitors, it faces pressure from traditional car rental businesses like Avis and Hertz as well as companies like Grab and Uber – who want to replace car ownership entirely.

To date, Drivemate has over 6,000 cars in its system covering 35 cities in Thailand. Users have booked over 1,000 cars since it started about a year ago, with the company taking at 25 percent cut of each transaction.

Drivemate offers insurance to car owners, covering damages. It uses the same insurer, Liberty Mutual, that serves Turo.