Polish Electronics Rental Startup Plenti Raises $5M

Poland’s Plenti has raised $5.3 million to expand its electronic device rental service.

The funding will help as it launches PlentiPartners, a program in which entrepreneurs buy devices that are then leased back to Plenti, EU Startups reported Thursday (Feb. 9).

“Over the last four years we’ve proven that consumers and entrepreneurs value access to their devices over ownership,” said Wojciech Rokosz, Plenti’s co-founder and CEO, per the report. “We’ve developed a platform that solves the issue on the demand side. Now we are introducing the solution for the supply side that allows us to remain asset-light, entrepreneurs to earn on device rentals, and end-users to have even easier access to the gear they need.”

The Warsaw-based company lets consumers rent electronic devices, game consoles, phones, laptops, virtual reality (VR) headsets, and household products like air purifiers and coffee machines, the report stated. Customers can use what they need while reducing their impact on the environment.

The funding comes as people are spending less money on electronics as the number of consumers living paycheck to paycheck grows.

Only about 22% of people who live paycheck to paycheck and have no difficulty paying their bills said they would purchase expensive electronics or appliances. For those who do struggle, the number is a bit higher, at 29%.

Just 20% of consumers in the middle-income bracket — those who earn $50,000 to $100,000 per year — expect to spend money on “big-ticket” electronics in the months ahead.

However, the tech rental trend isn’t just confined to consumer electronics. Speaking to PYMNTS in October, Sam Selldorff, vice president of B2B for the German rent-a-tech firm Grover, said businesses are increasingly attracted to the value that tech rental offers.

These benefits include a more flexible, more sustainable and often cheaper alternative to buying expensive products outright.

Businesses are “moving away from an office-centered structure [and focusing] more on digitalization within the organization, and both of those things mean that you need new tech and new ways of working,” Selldorff told PYMNTS.

As a result, IT and business leaders are reconsidering hardware procurement, and the strategy of buying new tech equipment every few years has stopped making business sense.

And as businesses embrace remote employment and more agile operations, using the “Device-as-a-Service” model offers them more flexibility to scale geographically. It also means they can equip employees with the technology they need as and when it suits them.

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