Two names, two countries, 120,000 cars, and $60M in funding – iCarsClub gets a fresh round

Car rental startup iCarsClub and PPzuche, which spans Singapore and mainland China, has raised US$60 million in series B funding, the team confirmed today. The investment comes from IDG Capital Partners and MorningSide Ventures.

It comes just four months after a first major round worth US$10 million.

iCarsClub focuses on Singapore-based rentals, while PPzuche has now grown to cover 12 Chinese cities. It first expanded to the country in October last year when it only had cars available in Beijing.

The service offers street-side peer-to-peer rentals, similar to US-based RelayRides (though the Singapore startup’s newest funding dwarfs the series A and B rounds that RelayRides has attracted). Car owners can make money from their cars’ idle time by joining the site and making their car available for rent whenever it’s convenient. Across its two areas, iCarsClub and PPzuche now have over 120,000 private cars available – that’s up from just 300 when the team first got seed funding from Red Dot Ventures and the National Research Foundation in early 2013.

Singapore’s government makes car ownership prohibitively expensive and as a result only about 15 percent of Singaporeans own a car. That’s a huge opening for iCarsClub and other informal car rental services. Hiring a medium-ish sedan for the day on iCarsClub, such as a Kia Cerato, costs S$90 (US$70) per day – or pay by the hour, if you prefer – which works out cheaper than more formal rental companies like Hertz, which ranges from S$120 to S$200 (US$93 to $155) for equivalent models.

Backlash

This kind of car sharing is a nice concept, but it’s hard to do right in reality. iCarsClub was recently lambasted by one Singapore-based entrepreneur (in a widely-read blog post among the local startup community) for a series of issues and a lack of customer support. Meanwhile, in China, PPzuche has been hit with negative publicity in the Shanghai Daily over a woman’s stolen car that could leave the owner waiting three months for any form of compensation if her sedan isn’t recovered. The startup does not have an operating license from the Shanghai Transport Commission, the paper said, which is usually required by car rental companies.

“We are aware of this issue and this case is a lot more complicated than it seems. There’s a chance that the woman orchestrated the whole thing and is in cahoots with a competitor,” claims Clifford Teo, the startup’s managing director. Teo adds that the in-car black box that iCarsClub and PPzuche installs so as to track cars can “flag high risk rentals.” But the alleged theft in Shanghai saw the crooks deactivate the tracking.

See: China’s taxi app market breaks 150 million users, and it’s totally dominated by two apps