CED Tech Venture profile: KWIPPED, targeting B2B equipment rentals

Wilmington startup KWIPPED – get it, equipped? – is aiming to help match providers across a wide variety of business sectors with people and businesses who need to rent specialized equipment.

Kwipped is among the presenters at the upcoming CED Tech Venture conference in Raleigh.

Here’s a profile in a Q&A, which is one of a series of Tech Venture presenting firms being offered as a result of a partnership between the Council for Entrepreneurial Development and WRAL TechWire.

What is the focus of your business?

To leverage the power and efficiencies of an online platform to create the world’s most comprehensive B2B equipment rental marketplace. Our platform connects renters that need to rent specialized commercial equipment with a global network of pre-sourced suppliers that have equipment available for rent.

What is the top pain point/business application you are seeking to address?

In many industries, equipment rental suppliers are sparse and fragmented. Sourcing and renting many types of specialized equipment can be a cumbersome, time consuming and often fruitless process. KWIPPED has aggregated equipment suppliers across more than 20 industry verticals enabling renters in need to quickly and easily locate, compare and rent virtually any type of commercial equipment.

What makes it unique?

Even in today’s digital world where online consumer marketplaces like Uber and Airbnb are causing massive disruption, there are relatively few businesses leveraging the marketplace model to offer B2B solutions. More specifically, the few players in the online equipment rental space, like BigRentz (heavy construction), Yard Club ( heavy construction) and Borrow Lenses (photography) are limited to renting equipment in a single industry.

KWIPPED believes the equipment rental process is industry agnostic and our platform provides a complete and proprietary equipment rental solution that works for any industry. We currently support equipment rental across more than 20 industries, including:

Laboratory
Medical
Surveying
Audio Visual
Heavy Construction
Electronic Testing
Photography & Film
Telecom
Oil Drilling
Environmental Testing
HVAC

And many more…

Plus, our platform is super flexible, so we can and do easily add new equipment categories as rental demand dictates.

Why should investors be interested in your firm?

A huge and rapidly growing market — The equipment rental space is estimated at $50 billion per year in the US and twice that in Europe. We’re mostly focused in the US right now, but we do intend to be global company.
Strong proof of concept — We have 400+ equipment suppliers, 1800+ registered renters/users, $40 million+ in equipment assets uploaded/listed on the site, and more than $200,000 in rentals.
Enterprise adoption — We went fully operational in the spring of 2015 and already our registered rental customers include top organizations, including: Apple Inc., Wal-Mart, Siemens, Sherman Williams, The Coca Cola Company, The University of Chicago Medical Center, The US Forest Service, BASF and more than a dozen major Universities.
Unique Proposition — There is truly no other business in the world that caters to equipment rental across as many diverse industries as KWIPPED.
Proven Leadership — Our Co-Founder and CEO, Robert Preville, is a serial entrepreneur and investor, having founded and led several high growth companies in the B2B arena. Prior to KWIPPED, he founded and sold GlobalTestSupply.com, a world-class provider of test and measurement equipment that ranked #800 on the INC 5000 fastest growing companies list. Prior to that, he was the founding employee and Vice President of Sales for MFG.com, the leading online manufacturing marketplace and a portfolio company of Jeff Bezos’s Bezos Expeditions.
Viable acquisition — As the first comprehensive B2B equipment rental marketplace, KWIPPED is uniquely positioned to become an appealing acquisition prospect for a wide range of organizations across many industry verticals.

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