About Turo
Turo was founded in 2009 by Shelby Clark under the earlier name RelayRides, building a peer-to-peer car sharing marketplace that lets individual car owners list their personal vehicles for rent to other individuals seeking short-term vehicle access, functioning conceptually similarly to how Airbnb built a peer-to-peer marketplace for short-term home rentals, applied instead to personal vehicles, letting car owners earn income from a vehicle that might otherwise sit unused for significant portions of time, while giving renters access to a much wider and often more interesting variety of specific vehicle makes, models, and types than traditional rental car companies typically offer from their more standardized fleet inventory.
Turo's marketplace has appealed to renters seeking either more affordable rental options than traditional rental car companies in certain markets, or specifically interesting or unusual vehicles, such as classic cars, luxury vehicles, or specialty vehicles like campervans, that traditional rental car companies generally don't offer given their focus on more standardized, higher-turnover fleet vehicles, while car owners have used the platform to generate supplemental income from vehicles they own but don't use constantly. The company has built insurance and verification infrastructure to help manage the risk inherent in a peer-to-peer vehicle sharing marketplace, including insurance coverage options for hosts and guests and verification processes for both vehicle owners and renters, addressing trust and safety considerations relevant to strangers sharing access to a valuable, potentially dangerous physical asset like an automobile. Turo has periodically faced regulatory challenges and disputes in certain jurisdictions and airports regarding whether and how existing rental car regulations and airport concession fee structures should apply to its peer-to-peer marketplace model, an ongoing area of regulatory ambiguity common to several sharing economy platforms that operate in categories with pre-existing regulatory frameworks designed around traditional business models. Turo completed a public listing. The company had raised substantial private venture funding over its history from investors including IAC, Kleiner Perkins, and Daimler prior to going public, competing with traditional rental car companies as well as other peer-to-peer and specialty vehicle rental platforms.
