RelayRides has raised $44 million to change the way people rent cars

RelayRides, the San Francisco-based car sharing service that’s going after the rental car industry, announced a $25 million funding round on Tuesday. The funding, a series B round, brings the company’s total fundraising to $44 million. Canaan Partners led the round which also included existing investors like Shasta Ventures, GoogleVentures, August Capital. RelayRides started as a service for people to rent their idle cars by the hour to those in need of wheels. The company has since shifted its focus to long-term rentals, a more lucrative business than the hourly rentals it was advertising before. Included in their rental offerings are airport rentals akin to more established players like Avis, Hertz, and Dollar.

RelayRides sounds a little bit like Uber (it’s a startup with cars) and a little bit more like Airbnb (it’s a startup with people loaning each other cars). In today’s tech world, that’s a pretty good formula for raising venture capital. RelayRides, which facilitates the renting out of your car to other people, has been around for four years and now focuses only on providing long-term (the minimum is a day) rentals where the owner and renter meet in person to size each other up and exchange the car keys. That’s a far cry from earlier versions that facilitated hourly rentals with automated entry, which competitor Getaround still does. So now RelayRides has raised $25 million in Series B funding, for a total of $44 million raised, led by Canaan Partners with existing investors August Capital, Google Ventures and Shasta Ventures. That’s not to say RelayRides is huge, though CEO Andre Haddad maintains the company is now growing extremely fast, having fully focused on the right model last October. The company only has “several hundred thousand” registered users, Haddad said. He would not specify how many of those users have logged in recently. “We’re still quite early, to be honest with you,” Haddad said.