Turbi, the rental startup that does not need to be Localiza

In 2016, Diego Lira arranged a meeting with the brothers Eugênio and Salim Mattar, the founders of Localiza.

At the time, the entrepreneur had just founded Turbi, an application-based car rental startup, and wanted to convince the Mattars to invest in the company.

The miners didn’t put their hands in their pockets, but they provided advice that helped shape the business.

“It was hard to get funding only with a PPT, since the cost of capital is high for this type of business,” Lira told Brazil Journal.

After the conversation, the founder of Turbi left determined to have a company asset light🇧🇷 Vehicles would be sublet from medium or large rental companies, and the relationship with customers would have to be completely digital.

Without stores and its own fleet, the startup developed a ‘car sharing’ business model in which the customer rents the car in the app and picks it up in parking lots spread across the cities where it operates (today São Paulo and the metropolitan region).

The company has about 2,000 cars in circulation and expects to close 2022 earning R$ 80 million.

Six years after the meeting with the Mattars, Turbi is only now buying its own fleet with the funds raised in its first issue of debentures.

The company raised BRL 105.8 million from investors such as Jive, Arc, Capitânia, Augme, Latache, Western and Fator. The operation, coordinated by XP, has a five-year term and pays CDI + 6%.

Turbi intends to allocate 90% of its resources to the acquisition of vehicles, which should reduce the cost of operating with third-party fleets by 35%.

The change in the operating model will also allow the company to enter the used car market, which is currently an important business for traditional rental companies.

Despite looking more and more like Localiza, Lira says that Turbi does not want to be a copy of the Mattar company. “The idea has always been that the customer could rent a car with the best experience and with the least contact with other people. In that sense, we don’t want to be Localiza.”

Last year, Turbi launched a vehicle subscription system even to compete with another competing startup, Kovi.

The subscription model is gaining more and more visibility in the rental market, attracting from traditional rental companies to automakers.

A BTG report predicts that the subscription market should more than triple in the next few years, and that large rental companies should gain even more market share.

One of Turbi’s challenges will be to gain space in this fight between grown-ups.

Source: Brazil Journal