Estonian Specialist VC invested in Finnish equipment rental platform Rentle
Estonian Specialist VC and Paris-based VC company Founders Future invested €2,2M in Finnish equipment rental platform Rentle. With this investment, Specialist VC and Founders Future joined a 3,8M seed round, which took place in May 2022. One of the investors of that round was the Estonian venture capital firm Tera Ventures.
Rentle was founded by Joel Mikkonen, Toomas Kallioja, and Tuomo Laine in Helsinki (Finland) in 2018. The platform helps start a rental business, designing and building a scheme for one-off rentals with the help of software for Commerce 3.0. The entrepreneurs can schedule and calculate the availability of goods on the platform, manage inventory, add articles, have a consistent view of inventory and stock levels, transfer inventory between locations, and ensure that there is the right amount of products available. The company solution gives tools to optimize inventory, for example, adding specifications, notes, and metadata to inventory articles, changing the color, sizes of products, and so on.
The platform can be used by small businesses, ski resorts, or retail brands such as the Finnish online store of auto parts and spare parts, tools, and leisure goods Motonet and manufacturer of sporting goods Decathlon UK to rent or sell their goods.
Specialist VC is a venture capital fund supporting companies from the Baltic region, Finland and Ukraine. Usually, it starts financing from €250K. The fund started its work in Tallinn in 2017. At the beginning of 2022, Specialist VC launched a new €50M, which gets support from Estonian LHV pension funds and the European Investment Fund through the European Guarantee Fund and the Baltic Innovation Fund 2. In 2023, the fund invested in the Estonian manufacturer of electric cargo bikes Vok Bikes, an Estonian investment platform allowing its users to invest in sustainable funds Grünfin, Mumbai-based building health companies startup 2070 Health, an Estonian developer of a complete solution for charging electric cars Vool, Estonian insurtech Value.Space.
Founders Future was founded in Paris in 2018 by Marc Ménasé. It is an investment platform focusing on startup studios, and startups at pre-seed, seed, and series A stages. The main target is companies at the A+ stage with scalable businesses (platforms, marketplace, and SAAS).
