Virtuo raises $96M Series C to become the leading alternative to owning a car

  • Jen Andre
Virtuo co-founders

This funding round will allow Virtuo to focus on a new objective: reaching one million active customers across Europe by 2025.

Virtuo was founded in 2016 to revolutionise the car rental industry, an industry typically fraught with long queues, arduous paperwork and hidden fees.Balderton first invested in Virtuo a year later in 2017.With its 100% digital app experience, Virtuo has not only emerged as the convenient and modern alternative to car rental for city escapes and mid-distance trips but as an alternative to owning a car altogether.

Our ambition for Virtuo and our car on-demand service is to reinvent our relationship with cars. To provide all the benefits that cars can offer while using technology to remove the physical burden. We believe you should be able to access a car the same way you stream music or films: the car should appear on demand when you need it, but disappear from sight when you don’t.

Karim Kaddoura and Thibault Chassagne, Co-founders, Virtuo

Thibault Chassagne and Karim Kaddoura , Virtuo’s Co-founders

This ambition was brought to life by Virtuo with the launch of their new delivery service, Virtuo Delivered, where you can get your Virtuo car delivered and collected from your chosen address. The service has been extensively tested and rolled out across London and recently launched in Paris and Madrid.

We want to put cars in people’s pockets, not on city streets.

The Virtuo app

The $60M Series C round was led by AXA Venture Partners, with participation from Bpifrance, Alpha Intelligence Capital, H14, and existing investors Balderton, Iris Capital and Raise Ventures. In addition, Natixis and several members of the Banque Populaire and Caisse d’Epargne Group granted Virtuo a pan-European asset-based financing of €$36M to support the development of its fleet. Currently present in France, the United Kingdom and Spain, Virtuo is already expanding to Milan and plans to launch in Germany by 2022 to cover about 10 markets by 2025.Virtuo is also looking to accelerate the electrification of its fleet. Following its industry-first partnership with Hyundai in France, which saw Virtuo integrating the Kona Electric into its fleet as part of a groundbreaking revenue sharing business model, Virtuo is aiming to electrify 50% of its fleet by 2025, and to have a 100% electric fleet by 2030.In the meantime, Virtuo has been offsetting 100% of its carbon footprint since 1 January 2021, contributing to local clean energy and certified projects in Europe.

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