Travel patterns have changed following the pandemic, and as more aspects of our daily lives become digital, more people’s cars sit idle awaiting a sporadic trip beyond the garage. Rather than owning or leasing a car for these intermittent jaunts, Kyte wants to connect people to short-term vehicle rentals that arrive and depart as needed, all on their own.
The company is working to build an autonomous fleet of rental vehicles that users can summon with their phones. Its online rental marketplace lets users rent cars for daily, weekly or monthly use.
Currently, a driver brings the car directly to a user’s doorstep, then takes off on an electric scooter to complete their next delivery. In the future, Kyte’s model will depend solely on autonomous vehicles delivering themselves. Until then, the company has a goal of enabling teleoperated trip options.
“As sensing and perception technology gets better, and as cars start to be able to make their own decisions in traffic, we’re going to see [a] major shift in the transportation ecosystem,” Ludwig Schoenack, Kyte co-founder, told Built In. “But what’s possible today is that you can remote control cars without passengers, and so this is a key part of our thesis that there will be a time when teleoperations will be feasible and will be deployed before a fully autonomous scenario.”
As it strives toward this vision, Kyte secured a $60 million round of Series B funding to expand its solution and enhance its tech. The company has raised a total of about $300 million across equity and debt funding. Investment firm InterAlpen Partners led Kyte’s latest round.
Kyte currently operates a fleet of a few thousand cars, a small portion of which are electric. One of Kyte’s main objectives is to build out an entirely electric fleet. Alongside lowering carbon emissions and helping Kyte stay on top of its environmental, social and governance commitments, the company’s electrified fleet will expose more people to the perks of driving EVs as they engage in the sharing economy.
“Sharing is ultimately about less utilization,” Schoenack said. “When we’re able to have a car not idle in somebody’s driveway, but instead [meeting] the transportation needs of dozens of people, that’s really what we’re solving for. ... We’re trying to make sharing not only palatable but exciting.”
On the way to its goal, Kyte has already recorded more than 5x growth since its Series A raise last year, according to the company. As it furthers this momentum, Kyte will invest in tripling the size of its fleet, expanding into new product categories and growing its footprint within existing markets and into new ones. The company currently operates in 14 cities including San Francisco, LA, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Portland, Miami and Washington, D.C.
Most of Kyte’s new capital will go toward product development and building out its tech infrastructure. The 100-person company plans to hire across its product and engineering departments.
