MakeSpace, has raised additional $17.5 million in funding led by Harmony Partners and Upfront Ventures to double its footprint of 3 cities (New York, Chicago & Washington DC) to 6 in 2016.
The New York-based startup founded in 2013 by Sam Rosen, previously raised over $10 million from Founders Fund, Carmelo Anthony’s Melo7Tech, Gary Vaynerchuk and others.
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“Consumers should never have to visit self-storage and never forget what’s in self-storage, ” founder and CEO Sam Rosen tells TechCrunch. There is “opportunity to bring fair and great pricing” while “having access in your pocket.”
MakeSpace is trying to provide an alternative to Public Storage and makes storage easy to access. The company enables free pickups and same-day service through its iPhone app. Customers can also manage photos of their items via the app and can request to have select items delivered for $19.99 anytime.
The company estimated the public storage market or $24 billion (now approaching $27 billion) in the US alone and the largest player in the space – Public Storage – had less than 10% market share.
Fragmented markets can be a great target for disruption. Public Storage does about $2.4 billion in revenue and has a public enterprise value of $44 billion.
Traditional storage centers “are the Blockbuster Video of storage and we are Netflix, ” Mark Suster, managing partner at Upfront Ventures, tells TechCrunch. “We deliver a superior product at a cheaper price and we will continue to crush them as our centralization model takes hold. Think about how Barnes & Noble or Borders did when Amazon centralized distribution.”
Other startups in the storage space include Box Butler and Boxbee.
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– Rosen, who formed the full-service storage company early in 2013 after learning an expensive lesson from Superstorm Sandy. Sam Rosen, co-founder and CEO of MakeSpace, which he describes as a next generation More…
