A lot can happen over a cup of coffee as it happened with Shirish, Ankit, and Kamlesh, Co-Founders, UrbanRent who were waiting at the Bangalore airport early in the morning when it was pouring outside. No cabs were available, but a lot of cars were parked in the parking lot. These unutilized assets were standing there depreciating, which otherwise could have been put to use by the owners. A conversation on how convenient it would be if they could rent one of those cars and drive home lead to seeding the idea to startoff their venture. Thus in 2019, the trio started UrbanRent with a vision to create a community that helps each other in living out their dreams without breaking their banks and reduce the burden on our environment. The company offers a niche platform where the customers can earn as well as save money without having to worry about the authenticity of the person they are transacting with and that of the related products.

For UrbanRent, customers can be either owners or renters of a product. The company encourages people to put up their unused or underused things on rent that they may not otherwise sell. This not only helps them generate additional income but also helps the community in making efficient use of the resources. The team verifies all its users on

the platform to en-sure a safe and trusted market place to undertake a rental transaction. Apart from the three co-founders, UrbanRent has a highly skilled team of Android/iOS developers, UI/UX experts, and testing and validation engineers. Shirish looks after Product Development, whereas Ankit and Kamlesh manage the Finance and Operations & Regional Marketing respectively. Today, UrbanRent is the Amazon of the peer-to-peerrental marketplace. Just in one city Pune, the company has catered to 2,500+ individual customers and witnessed 300+ transactions with an average rental value of Rs. 800/- each month.

UrbanRent has a highly skilled team of Android/iOS developers, UI/UX experts, and testing and validation engineers

UrbanRent helps the target audience who want to be entrepreneurs and run their business by opening an online rental store on its platform. "There are two main expectations from the users choice and rental price. We make the widest range of products available to our customers, and we are aggressively pursuing new owners and product categories. And the owners, in turn help us in getting the renters because of the choice offered on the platform," proclaims Shirish. UrbanRent offers a robust inventory management system to the owners to manage their rentals. People can add products to their rental store make it inactive, or make it available only in a certain time.

Ensuring that the owners and renters trust each other was a challenge. UrbanRent won it by deploying automated solutions that verify user's documents that are uploaded on the app. The other challenge was to ensure quality, and it implemented a two-way review and rating system by which an owner and a renter can both leave reviews for each other. The team weans out the undesirable users from the app. The app is currently available on Android and iOS, and the team is working to make the user experience better every day. UrbanRent is leading the B2C and C2C realm and envisions entering into B2B as well. It is expanding its product categories for rent and adding more products to the existing categories. "Our next step is to ensure that our business model supports our ambition to increase and improve the top line. We are looking to support our business and stakeholders using the cash we generate from the business itself. By focussing on our product portfolio and new space, we will meet these goals shortly, "he concludes.