INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
$35 million-funded Omni is packing up and shutting down after struggling to make the economics of equipment rentals and physical on-demand
a second wind after selling off its physical storage operations to competitor Clutter in May
Then sources tell me it tried to build a whitelabel software platform for letting brick-and-mortar merchants rent stuff like drills or tents
as well as sell them so Omni could get out of hands-on logistics
teams members and was in talks to sell its engineering team to Coinbase
Omni had internally discussed informing its retail rental partners ahead of time that it would be shutting down
operations at Omni and closing the platform by the end of this year
Omni CEO Tom McLeod did not respond to multiple requests for comment
working on.Omni originaly launched in 2015, offering to send a van to your house to pick up and index any of your possession, drive them to
a nearby warehouse, store them, and bring them back to you whenever you needed for just a few dollars per month
It seemed too good to be true and ended up being just that.Eventually Omni pivoted towards letting you rent out what you were storing so you
and it could earn some extra cash in 2017
Sensing a better business model there, it sold its storage business to Softbank-funded Clutter and moved to helping retail stores run rental
But that simply required too big of a shift in behavior for merchants and users, while also relying on slim margins.One major question is
whether investors will get any cash back
Omni raised $25 million from cryptocurrency company Ripple in early 2018
Major investors include Flybridge, Highland, Allen - Company, and Founders Fund, plus a slew of angels.The implosion of Omni comes as
the chaos at WeWork ahead of its planned IPO
VCs and their LPs want growth, but not at the cost of burning endless sums of money to subsidize prices just to lure customers to a
as many have with ride hailing
But for Omni, ballooning storage prices pissed off users as on-demand became less afforable than a traditional storage unit
Rentals were a hassle, especially considering users had to pick-up and return items themselves when they could just buy the items and get
lifetime value they can earn from customers may find their streams of capital running dry.
