WhatsOnRent
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
WhatsOnRent.com was a Bengaluru-based online rental marketplace founded in September 2015 by Sulabh Jain, Shreyans Shrimali and Bharat Goyal. It let users rent products across categories - home and kitchen appliances, laptops, furniture, treadmills and medical equipment. The company raised angel funding in January 2016 (investors included CommonFloor co-founder Lalit Mangal), operating only in Bengaluru with about 1,000 paying customers and 15-20 orders a day.
02 / WhatsOnRent FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
Co-founder Bharat Goyal said the shutdown was a conscious business decision: the team could not see the next funding round coming, and realized the business model might not work. The fundamental problem was changing consumer mindset - convincing Indians that renting made more sense than buying proved a huge deal. Without a pre-Series A round of a couple of million dollars, that behavioral change was impossible to finance.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Operations ended
WhatsOnRent ended operations.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
In January 2016, WhatsOnRent raised angel funding from investors including Lalit Mangal and Neeraj Gupta.
- 02
Unable to raise the pre-Series A round it needed and concluding the business model might not work, the company decided to wind up in November 2016.
- 03
WhatsOnRent shut down operations on November 14, 2016, returning more than 50% of its seed funding to investors.