ShareRing brings together sharing services across all industries and geographies with users, who can access, connect and pay for the services anywhere in the world

ShareRing, a two-sided marketplace that enables you to rent/share/borrow things with/from others, today announced that it has closed a AU$3.8 million (approximately US$3 million) in seed funding from friend and family investors.

The Australian startup will use the money to scale its development team, for app development and to improve its marketing strategy.

Founded in 2017 by Tim Bos, Rohan Le Page, Peter David and Neville Christie, ShareRing is an on-demand platform that aims to centralise the highly-fragmented sharing economy by bringing together sharing services across all industries and geographies with share economy users, who can securely access, connect and pay for these services anywhere in the world.

For users, the ShareRing system provides a one-stop shop of sharing services while removing expensive currency exchange rates and international transaction fees, irrespective of where you are in the world or what you’re borrowing, renting, or sharing.

For sharing companies, ShareRing offers a secure way to rent and share assets, allowing companies to scale, build trust in their brand and gain exposure to a much larger customer database.

Also Read: The problem with a sharing economy

“My vision is that you’ll be able to rent a lawnmower in Melbourne one week on our platform, and a bike in Beijing the next, and you won’t pay any forex fees, and both those providers will have instant verification of who you are. We want it to be like shopping on Amazon, where half the time it’s not Amazon actually selling you the product but you’re unaware of it,” ShareRing Co-founder and CEO Tim Bos told e27.

The investment comes at a time when ShareRing is in the market to raise US$48 million through its utility tokens sale. The firm launched the private pre-sale of SHR token on March 5, 2018 and has had requests totalling US$10.8 million to date. Its public pre-sale will open on March 19 2018, with the minimum contribution for pre-sale participants set at US$150,000.

Prior to the completion of the ShareLedger blockchain, the SHR token will be issued on the Ethereum blockchain using an ERC20 token standard and will be sold via a whitelist sale process, with a know your client (KYC) verification process for all contributions.

“Thirty per cent of the tokens will be spent incubating startups in the sharing economy. These will be directed straight into the startups themselves, as well as initiatives like pitch fests, because we want to grow and harness a strong, global, grassroots community around the sharing economy,” added Bos.

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