A car sharing in Zivu only helps Tesla owners to earn money

Hebron Share remembers the awakening dreams in 2019 when Elon Musk promised that Tesla cars would become a robota, able to go out in the world to make money for the owners. Sher was already a user of the Toro car sharing platform, and the idea of ​​converting Tesla into a larger money maker was an attractive proposal.

But with the passage of years, Musk failed to follow this promise. Therefore, in 2021, Sher assembled a small team and brought the co -founder Saima Chaudhry to start his private company. “Hey, we will do this ourselves,” think about that time.

What it built is a new start to exchange cars from counterpart to counterparts ZivuIt is widely similar to Turro, but it focuses exclusively on electric cars.

A start -up company, based in Dallas, has been working for about 10 months, and on Friday it announced that it had raised $ 6 million in financing, as it is looking to expand in the major cities of the United States. Sher told Techcrunch that Zevo is already tracking more than $ 8 million of repeated annual revenues (ARR), and has a waiting list of more than 3,500 customers – all with no marketing so far.

Sher said that an overwhelming part of this interest comes from the tenant, which is a huge part of this benefit from the party workers. About 90 % of people who use zevo to rent EV do this to transfer passengers to Uber or Lyft, or deliver Doordash.

Sher said he believed that Zivu has “the secret sauce on how cars made a very profitable exchange of the host at very reasonable prices for the tenant.”

So what is the secret sauce?

“It will be crazy,” said Sher. “We have deliberately raised the capital. We have rejected Capital VC for this

He said that Bootstrapping Zevo allowed Sher to collect good engineers, develop a strong strategy to go to the market, and cause “real disturbance”.

By keeping the concentration of things, Sher said that Zivu is able to send more money to car owners more than they will get platforms like Turro.

Sher also talked about the “without contact” process from Zivu, which allows the owners and tenants to share a car without having to deliver the main keys or cards.

These are not new-many other car sharing services have adopted a similar contact. But Sher has argued that the nature of Zevo does not communicate with is the introduction because the service is used only EVS, which tends to be more technical capacity and therefore easier to integrate into the smartphone application.

Sher said this connection makes it easy to integrate other important pieces of car sharing equation, such as commercial insurance. He said that removing the red tape like this is what made the platform very attractive to workers, especially since many of them do not have credit degrees required by large leasing or car rental services. Sher said that one of the users likened Zivu Petrob car.

He said: “There is (usually) a lot of red tape: insurance cards, accidents, fees, high charges, bills, payment. We have really been able to automate all of this.” Add that EVS tends to a lower maintenance request – which means more time – and it is easy to understand why the party workers are interested in.

The result of all this is that in the early time, Zivu is witnessing an average rental of about 80 days. Meanwhile, hosts can return between 35 % and 65 % of the cost of their car in only one year, according to Sher. Since 90 % of the vehicles on the platform are Teslas, Bashir felt very confident that he was able to find a different way to provide the Musk promise from 2019.

Of course, Tesla is now on the edge of the abyss Robotaxi service launch in Austin, TexasAnd perhaps other American cities later this year. There are many questions that have not been answered about how this service works, and whether the Tesla program will perform safely, and how easy the owners are to put their cars on the network. But Tesla seems closer to ever to put the musk vision on the test.

This does not worry Sher, though. He said that Zivu focuses on the laser on disrupting the participation of cars, and does not want to tamper with the horseback piece followed by Tesla. He believes that Zivu can break $ 100 million with only 30 people and minimal future investment.

Even if Tesla can eat in the concert economy with a fleet of robots – which is still very large if – Sher said that Musk will need to find a way to form millions more than it already does to meet the total demand for horse riding and connections.

“There is enough for everyone here on the table,” he said.