RelayRides Rebrands As Turo, Raises $47 Million Led By Kleiner
Context & Ripple Effects
The Via raise earlier that year showed investor appetite spreading beyond Uber-style ride-hailing into the wider shared-mobility stack, and RelayRides' move extends it to the ownership side of the ledger: a peer-to-peer rental marketplace where car owners, not fleets, supply the inventory. The rebrand to Turo plus a $47 million round led by Kleiner signals the company is shedding its early identity to compete as a consumer travel brand rather than a car-sharing niche player.
The arc since has validated the pivot — Turo went on to close a $92M Series D led by Daimler and SK Holdings, extend that round with money from American Express Ventures and Sumitomo, then reach a $1B+ valuation in a $250M IAC-led Series E, lifting total funding toward $450M.
First-order effects
- Turo gets a clean brand and $47M in growth capital from Kleiner, freeing it from the RelayRides name as it scales its owner-supplied rental marketplace against traditional rental companies.
Second-order effects
- Automakers and financial players end up buying into the model rather than fighting it — Daimler leads Turo's Series D and hands over its own Croove platform, while American Express Ventures and Sumitomo join the round's extension, making OEMs and card networks stakeholders in peer-to-peer rental.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, car rental consolidates around asset-light marketplaces backed by the very incumbents they disintermediate, pushing valuation benchmarks for sharing-economy platforms into unicorn territory by the time of Turo's IAC-led Series E.
The trend: Peer-to-peer marketplaces are absorbing capital and strategic investment from incumbent industries — automakers, banks, trading houses — turning shared-access platforms into the default layer over owned assets.