Kyte Raises $9M to Expand Doorstep Car Delivery in the US
Today we couldn’t be more excited to share that Kyte has raised $9M from DN Capital and Amplo VC, with participation from former Uber executives including Ed Baker (former VP of Product) and Jörg Heilig (former VP of Engineering), Josh Mohrer and William Barnes as well as innovators in travel and mobility like Toby Sun (co-founder, Lime) and Terry Jones (co-founder, Kayak and Travelocity). The funding will allow us to accelerate our mission to give people better access to fewer cars across new geographies. We’re already in San Francisco, Boston and Los Angeles.
We built Kyte to address a major gap in the mobility market. Uber and Lyft are great solutions for a single ride delivered right to your doorstep, but no such solution exists for when you need a car for a few days or weeks. People are forced to trek to a car rental branch, which is usually located by the airport or in a location outside of the city-center and then wait in a long line in an enclosed space for their rental. Some have turned to carshare platforms, where one is left to locate an uninspected (and often uncleaned) car on their own and fend for themselves, making quality and reliability highly unpredictable.
Enter: Kyte. We bring the same amazing experience to renting a car that people have come to expect in every other part of their life. Whether it’s ordering a package on Amazon, a ride on Uber, or a meal on Uber Eats, doorstep delivery has become table stakes. Kyte reliably delivers a quality car to the customer with just a few taps in our app. What makes the magic possible all comes down to our fleet operations platform matching people with cars in the right place at the right time, ultimately orchestrating vehicle movements across dense urban areas. We partner with existing professionally managed fleets, allowing us to focus solely on perfecting the consumer experience and building technology - not on managing assets.
“We believe that Kyte is going to be a core building block to the future of mobility,” said Steve Schlenker, Co-Founder and Managing Director, DN Capital. “The pandemic has accelerated the transformation of cities and consumer behavior with respect to transportation. Kyte’s unique operations layer facilitates this transformation while providing a level of service and convenience that other solutions fail to meet. We are excited to help the Kyte team, with our investment, to accelerate delivery of this solution to more people in more places.”
One of the things we’re most proud of is that when customers try us, they love us. Despite fast growth in the past months, over half of our bookings come from recurring users and our Net Promoter Score of 85 is unseen in the industry. We’ve also watched as people have become increasingly reliant on our product during the pandemic and have grown 400% since March. This has been fueled by a decrease in plane travel and a resurgence in the road trip and weekend getaway. Kyte offers one of the cleanest and safest ways to access a car for these adventures.
From customer feedback we understand that Kyte - in combination with ridesharing and micro-mobility - is truly building towards a better and more efficient transportation system that focuses around people and not cars. A world where people don’t have to own cars and can have better access to fewer cars because cars are stored in central hubs and are moved to where they are needed through Kyte. Owning a car is incredibly expensive and cumbersome, plus it results in vehicles taking up precious curb space that could be better used for things like parklettes and outdoor dining. In order to build towards this human-centric vision, Kyte unlocks the most compelling and easy way to get a car for consumers. To achieve this, we need to grow and be universally available in cities spanning the country. We can’t wait to step up to the challenge and make this a reality.
We started Kyte after working at Uber, BMW, and McKinsey. We grew the team with people from category defining companies like Expedia, Bird, Apple and Facebook - and we continue to grow. If you’d like to join us on our mission, check out our job openings. If you’re interested in trying out Kyte, book with us here or download our app today in the Apple Store. If you’re a member of the press that would like to chat with us about today’s news or the industry more broadly, email hello@drivekyte.com.