​KWIPPED Inc., an equipment rental marketplace headquartered in Wilmington, N.C., today announced that it has grown their supplier network by 36 percent in the third quarter.

The platform, an online business-to-business equipment rental marketplace, launched earlier this year. The company announced that it has added more than 250 suppliers to their marketplace, and has added customers including Fortune 500 companies, governmental agencies, and universities.

“We’re confident that we’ve achieved proof of concept,” said Robert Preville in an interview with WRAL Tech Wire. “The business model is new.”

The marketplace functions by facilitating the rental process for large equipment such as centrifuges, spectrometers, and bulldozers between equipment suppliers and businesses. The platform automates the entire rental process, including price quotes, scheduling, insurance, security deposits, contracts and contract execution, shipping, and payment. The company generates revenue through charging a transaction fee when a contract is initiated and confirmed.

The company has seen a large demand for medical and laboratory supplies, said Preville. “There’s such a void of equipment rental offerings in the space,” said Preville, “yet the demand is very high.” Many customers are in need of large, expensive equipment for short-term projects, said Preville, so a supply rental concept is often more economical than purchasing equipment.

Those aren’t the only verticals in which the company operates. Companies from 17 industries have supplied more than 3,000 pieces of equipment through the marketplace since the launch in February of 2015. Rentals are already booked through March of 2016.

Preville is an experienced entrepreneur that helped build MFG.com in the early 2000s. Jeff Bezos of Amazon acquired half of the company, which relied on an online marketplace to connect customers to manufacturing suppliers. Preville began Global Test Supply in Wilmington in 2004, later selling the business, including the profitable rental division, to a Canadian company in 2011.

His new venture has taken $250,000 in seed investment, hired four employees, and plans to pursue Series A funding in early 2016. Preville will be presenting KWIPPED to attendees of the One Million Cups event at The Frontier in Research Triangle Park on Wednesday, November 4, 2015.

The KWIPPED corporate and governmental client list includes: The Coca-Cola Company, Sherwin-Williams, The United States Navy, Under Armour, Michigan International Speedway, BASF, General Dynamics, Boston Scientific, and the U.S. Forest Service.

The KWIPPED university client list includes: UCLA, Ohio State University, George Washington University, Oklahoma State University, University of South Carolina, and the University of Florida.

Full client lists can be found on the KWIPPED website.