Impellity facilitates the acquisition of BookAClassic by RYDE
“Impellity is delighted to facilitate the acquisition of BookAclassic by RYDE. RYDE is revolutionising the car sharing industry, connecting a vibrant community of hosts and guests to deliver exceptional customer experiences, and we’re proud to merge with a global business with shared, mutual values. The acquisition serves to consolidate yet another leading-edge P2P booking platform, with a joint emphasis on offering world-class customer service.
- Kent Mosbech, Chief Executive Officer, Impellity
Case Study Introduction
RYDE is a cutting-edge online and mobile luxury car sharing rental platform, which has recently announced its Impellity-assisted acquisition of London-based BookAclassic, the leading online booking portal for the rental of classic and vintage vehicles.
With a large and varied collection of cars, buses, trucks, and motorbikes in the UK alone, BookAclassic boasts a portfolio of more than 20,000 vehicles available in 36 countries and offers the most extensive online collection of classic and vintage vehicles for private and corporate events, film productions, commercials, fairs, and museums, and its acquisition by RYDE follows RYDE’s announcement of its acquisition of Vinty, the largest and fastest-growing classic and vintage car sharing platform in the US, at the tail end of 2019.
About Impellity
Impellity offers consulting and management services to companies wishing to expand their businesses across borders. Using a variety of competencies, they provide a holistic solution to each individual company, and Impellity is the driving force in the process of moving into new markets: as the company’s ethos dictates – Detect the problem. Create a solution. Implement it.
Founded in April 2006 under the name Want Export Ltd., Impellity offers consulting and management services to companies wishing to expand their businesses across borders.
Impellity Ltd has continued to build on its successes and reputation, which has enabled the company to develop and introduce a more diverse portfolio of products and services on offer to clients, such as investment sourcing, investment opportunities, and lead generation.
This continued success has seen the company expand exponentially and support the management and additional needs for both existing and new clients, relative to expanding into overseas trading: RYDE’s acquisition of BookAclassic is the latest to be added to the Impellity portfolio.
Background
Impellity were approached in 2014 by the Founder of BookAclassic to help facilitate an international business development strategy for scaling the company. As part of this support, Impellity committed to sourcing investment capital for the growth of BookAclassic.
When BookAclassic first approached Impellity, BookAclassic was operating in seven European jurisdictions including Denmark, Sweden, and Norway with a total booking value of £200K: Impellity then secured the first round of seed funding of £180K, with additional countries being added. A more comprehensive business development strategy was then implemented, and it was found that further funding was required to scale the company further.
This scaling was then supported by two additional rounds of funding of £220K and £200K respectively: this funding raised BookAclassic’s valuation to £4M.
This scaling was then supported by two additional rounds of funding of £220K and £200K respectively: at a £4M valuation.
Scaling
Impellity took BookAclassic’s proven concept in its seven operational jurisdictions and scaled this internationally, rolling the model out to a total of 37 countries worldwide, with initial growth from seven to 19 jurisdictions in less than a year-and-a-half, and the remaining 18 countries in two years: with a total of 37 jurisdictions onboard, Impellity had increased BookAclassic’s booking turnover by 190%.
This growth in jurisdictions came with its own challenges, mainly the multilingual translations associated with global growth, which led Impellity to source a software development partner that could deliver a more bespoke internal booking platform and enable BookAclassic to operate cross-country, amalgamating the company’s databases into one sophisticated back-end system.
This streamlining of BookAclassic’s booking software required Impellity to research legislation across all new operating jurisdictions, including licenses and government bodies to ensure the system worked within all regulatory frameworks.
The strategy was to create a totally self-operating booking system that would require a very low number of staff to run and maintain: around 90% of bookings through the BookAclassic system are between the car owner and the person wishing to book the car, with minimal input from BookAclassic or its agents.
Merger
Once Bookaclassic’s original Founder realised the full scale of what needed to be done to grow BookAclassic globally, Impellity sourced a merger with RYDE, a cutting-edge online and mobile luxury car sharing rental platform based in California.
RYDE has been revolutionising the car sharing industry, connecting a vibrant community of hosts and guests to deliver exceptional customer experiences, and both Impellity and BookAclassic viewed RYDE as a successful global business with shared, mutual values.
Through Impellity’s existing network of interested parties, RYDE seemed the most compatible in terms of what level the company was operating at, and the similar growth journey that BookAclassic was projected to embark on. Impellity constructed the terms of the merger and executed the signing of a full merger agreement between both parties.
Strategy
Classic car owners are an active community, and a community of passionate individuals who share a fondness for timeless and quintessentially vintage motorcars and other vehicles. Part of Impellity’s brand strategy was to tap into this community of approximately 50 million registered classic cars worldwide, with a projected acquisition of 2% global market share, the equivalent to one million cars registered on the BookAclassic database.