Nikhil Chhabra moved to Bangalore a few years ago and was looking for furniture to furnish his home. The online shopping space was taking off at that time , but Nikhil really only wanted to make a temporary arrangement and get some required furniture on rent. When he saw that there was no good marketplace available online for renting out goods, he decided to solve the problem himself and started Rentongo.
Rentongo is an online marketplace where owners of unused products can put them on rent and borrowers can borrow these products after paying a security deposit. The company was started by Nikhil in November 2012 from Bangalore. Rentongo allows C2C as well as B2C renting on their platform and currently features products in about 17 categories. The site currently sees more than 1500 visits daily on the site whereas more than 200 leads are generated each day . Rentongo today is a 5 people team and has more than 120 lending companies and more than 1000 products registered on the site. Rentongo services are currently available in Bangalore, Pune, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Delhi.
Nikhil Chhabra is the founder and CEO of Rentongo. Nikhil is an IIMC MBA and has worked in the IT industry for a number of years before starting Rentongo.In February this year, Rentongo was selected to be a part of NASSCOM 10,000 Startups program.
The online renting market is highly unorganized and is dealing with a number of challenges right now. Verifying the condition of products, making sure that the condition of the product is maintained during the rent out period, travel cost being more than the renting cost of the product and the constant tug of war between lender and borrower for security deposit are some of the challenges that the company is trying to solve by creating the right processes. The company plans to deal with these challenges by focusing on ‘Quality of Service’ they provide by making sure that the product is of a certain quality standard, that the renter and the borrower are both verified by the company and adding processes to make sure that the renting – borrowing process is carried out smoothly.
Going forward, the company wants to do all the transaction processing via the Rentongo platform and is working towards the same. They also plan to expand deeper into each categories first and then include new categories and cities to their lists. The company is currently in talks with a number of investors to raise funding.
