Rent the Runway becomes a unicorn: raises 125 million and is now valued at 1 billion

The company, which was born in 2019, closed a new investment round led by Franklin Templeton Investments and Brain Capital Ventures.

MDS

26 mar 2019 - 17:00

New unicorn in fashion business. The US e-commerce of clothing rental services Rent the Runway raised 125 million dollars in a investment round led by Franklin Templeton Investments and Brain Capital Ventures. Rowe Price Group and Hamilton Lane Advisors also participated in the round, joining the shareholding. It is the highest round of the company to date. Since its inception, Rent the Runway has raised 337 million dollars.

The valuation of the company already amounts to 1 billion dollars, with which it becomes a unicorn, a term coined in 2013 to refer to those startups that amount to that valuation in some of its rounds.

The objective is to allocate this new injection of capital to enlarge the offer and underpin the company’s infrastructure. In the coming months, Rent the Runway will open a new fulfillment center in Texas, a macro-store in San Francisco and a technological center in Ireland.

Rent the Runway is also owned by the investment arm of Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba

The company also wants to expand its drop box service, which provides lockers to facilitate returns, to add more than a hundred this year. This idea was the result of an alliance with the coworking giant WeWork, and has spread to the offices of companies such as Goldman Sachs.

A year ago, Blue Pool Capital, an investment fund that has among its drivers Jack Ma and Joe Tsai, CEO and co-founder of Alibaba, respectively, made an injection of 21 million dollars in Rent the Runway.

Rent the Runway was born in 2009 as an e-commerce platform for the rental of designer fashion for celebrations. Since then, the company has also opened physical stores in cities such as New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Washington. The group, which sells around 400 brands, has also diversified its business to offer the rental of fashion garments for daily use.