E151: Car Rental Is Still Stuck in 2005. Sigvi Wants to Change That

Hello everyone and welcome back to Portfolio Spotlight and today we have drum rolls, very exciting news and announcement. We have Darius from Zigbee who are the latest addition to our portfolio team. So Darius, hello, love us, good to see you.

Hi, Zivile. Happy to be here. And yeah, very exciting time to talk about Sigvi. So I'm a chief growth officer at this company and I was leading the fundraising initiative and very happy to be with Superhero Capital.

We are very happy to have you. And I'm glad that we're having this conversation on the day you've just announced also your round. And I always like to kick off with this a bit of a visionary question. So, OK, the round is closed. What's next and what are you envisioning?

Yeah, so generally, Sigvy is building an AI agent that automates as many processes as possible within car rental industry. And generally, we see that throughout the whole travel industry, many other sectors actually became significantly more automated. When you compare user experience of, I don't know, Airbnb or in general, renting a hotel room, it's significantly more smooth than car rental industry. Yet we see a lot of technology was created around this industry, but not adopted, especially by small and medium sized companies. So we envisioned building the whole digital infrastructure layer for all the small, medium rental companies. That means predictive maintenance, dynamic pricing, all the models that increase your revenue per car and helps you to understand the profitability of it. Because very often these businesses see the bottom line, but they actually struggle with analytics of what are the actions that actually are the most profitable ones. And also, I think the big one in this industry is transparency and trust. Especially if you take like south of Europe where lots of people have stories how they felt that a car rental company scammed them and then they don't trust them. And we're that layer that does build not only the infrastructure, but the trust between the car owner and person who is traveling. That's pretty much the vision. We're growing the team around it. And yeah, that's an exciting bit.

So how are you going to build that trust and to revolutionize this industry that, as you mentioned, sometimes causes a bit of anxiety and difficulties or unfair advantage of some big car rental companies?

Yeah, I think when you're talking about trust, you're trusting those big brands who've been there for like 100 years. With the smaller ones, it's a little bit problematic. And just because they have their own locations and sometimes they lack standards of how do they operate. We have the fully standardized procedure of how each car has to look like, how the process of booking a car needs to look like, how they unlock the car, how they leave the car in the same or a different parking spot. And all of it is worked out. And then when you can actually onboard hundreds of those small and medium-sized companies with their fleets and provide for the final end user the same experience, whoever they took car from, that's actually a very powerful tool for us. in lithuania we started with very small number of cars we took private