HiyaCar Raises £1.3M to Build a Community-Powered Peer-to-Peer Car Hire Platform

HiyaCar, a UK mobility technology company, has raised £1.3 million via Republic Europe (formerly Seedrs) and undisclosed investors to develop its peer-to-peer car hire marketplace. The company operates a platform through which private car owners can list their vehicles for hire to other drivers — generating income from an asset that sits unused for the majority of its life, while giving renters access to a wider and more conveniently located supply of vehicles than traditional car hire companies can provide.

Peer-to-peer car sharing is one of the cleaner examples of the platform economy applied to a category where the underlying economics make strong sense. Private cars in the UK are parked and unused for approximately 96 percent of their lives. During that idle time, the owner bears the full cost of insurance, depreciation, and parking without generating any return from the asset. For the renter, traditional car hire offers vehicles from relatively few, often inconveniently located depot locations, at prices that include the overheads of large commercial fleets. A peer-to-peer marketplace changes both sides of this equation: owners earn from their car's idle time, and renters access vehicles from much denser, community-distributed locations at prices that can undercut commercial alternatives.

HiyaCar differentiates from the pure rental marketplace model by building community and trust as deliberate product features. The platform includes driver verification, vehicle inspection tools, community reviews, and insurance infrastructure that gives both owners and renters confidence in each transaction. The company positions car sharing as a genuinely communal activity as well as an economic one — neighbours renting to neighbours, with the mutual benefit and trust that this framing implies. This is a meaningful differentiator in a market where the primary barriers to peer-to-peer car sharing adoption are concerns about vehicle damage, insurance liability, and the reliability of unfamiliar renters.

The funding will be used to develop the platform, expand the supply of listed vehicles in key urban markets, and build the insurance and trust infrastructure that underpins the peer-to-peer model at scale.

Sources

• HiyaCar — company website