Singapore-based online car rental markeplace Drive.sg has raised $790,000 (SGD 1 million) in a Series A round from Insas Berhad, an investment company in Malaysia.
Drive.sg will use the fund to expand its service to other Asian markets - beginning with Malaysia and Philippines. The online reservation sites for both of these countries will be ready by mid-2014 and will also offer rental of mini-coaches and limousines.
In January 2013, the company announced a seed investment for $157,000 from private investor John Tan.
The company's service include online car rental for short-term, long-term and chauffeur driven services.
Co-founder Adrian Lee says:
"Our goal is to provide local citizens and travellers with a familiar digital platform to meet their land transport needs. We want to build up a reliable brand that customers can trust wherever they are in Asia."
The company claims that the country's recent restrictions on vehicle financing has led the locals to increasingly rent cars for key occasions, rather than owning a vehicle.
Competitors of Drive.sg includes Moobitaxi, GrabTaxi, Uber (into its second year of operation, recently launched UberX too), and ride sharing services like Split-it.sg and GoMyWayapp.
Founded in 2011, the company's customer base has crossed 15,000, and it has over 4,000 cars from 50 car rental partners such as Avis, BKW, Wearnes, Alltrust, Falcon-air, Neo, Vertex and others.