Furlenco raises $6M to be the Uber for furniture in India

Taxi apps like Uber and Ola have got us used to the convenience and affordability of shared cars. It no longer feels imperative to own one. Why bother with the maintenance and parking?

But what about furniture? Will we stop being possessive about that too? Will we simply access whatever we need instead, and change our furniture whenever we want? Is India ready for this?

Furlenco thinks so. It’s a Bangalore-based startup that lets you rent furniture. And not just furniture – you could also get a complete home furnishing solution on a monthly rental of US$100.

There are many flexible options – you can choose items you like or just get the living room set up with couches, center table, lamps, and soft furnishing. And the best part? When you get tired of something – just ask Furlenco to take it away, and get a new writing table or even a complete new look for your home. You can do all that at different price points too – like booking a hatchback or a Lamborghini, depending on what you can spend.

This seems custom-made for a city like Bangalore, with its large migrant population of tech workers. Sid Talwar, partner at Lightbox VC, which has just invested US$6 million in Furlenco, tells Tech in Asia why:

Today, the average employee at an IT firm will move homes 8-10 times between college and turning 50. It’ll happen for different reasons –work-related relocation, earning more money, getting married, starting a family, and so on. Each home will have a different feel, different spaces, and different needs. Yet, most of the time, the furniture will remain constant. Not because it’s what you want, but because changing it is expensive, time-consuming and very inconvenient – what do you do with the old furniture? This is where Furlenco comes in.

Furlenco founder Ajith Karimpana, who moved back to India after working for Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs in the US, first started up Rent Ur Dunia in 2012. The more anglicized name Furlenco came later.

Now it is ready to scale up with the series A funding, as India shifts towards a sharing economy.

“To own something is becoming less and less important. And technology is playing a key role in this evolution. Thanks to the growth in the number of smartphones and internet connectivity, we can easily access the benefits of almost anything we want, whenever we want it,” says Sid Talwar.

For Lightbox, the investment into Furlenco has been the biggest so far from its second fund of US$100 million raised late last year.