Omni Rentals, a storage and rental company backed by $35 million in funding, which includes contributions from San Francisco-based Fintech firm Ripple, is reportedly halting its operations.
Omni’s management says it’s preparing to shut down its platform by the end of this year. Around 10 engineers currently working at Omni will be hired by San Francisco-headquartered digital asset exchange Coinbase, according to a November 25 report from TechCrunch.
Omni’s development team had not issued an official closure announcement, however, a company spokesperson told Cointelegraph:
“We’ll be winding down operations at Omni and closing the platform by the end of this year. We are proud of what we built and incredibly thankful for everyone who supported our vision over the past five and a half years.”
According to sources familiar with the matter, the company’s services were good for clients, however, scaling Omni’s operations would have been quite challenging and costly.
Coinbase had previously held talks with Omni regarding a potential opportunity of hiring the firm’s engineering staff (in October 2019). Omni’s business had been performing poorly at that time, as the company was reportedly finding it difficult to get new customers.
In order to address the problem, Omni had been preparing to introduce a white-label service that would let merchants run and market their own rental services.
A Coinbase spokesperson told TechCrunch that the company had made a deal with Omni to recruit members of its engineering staff, however, the exchange did not mention what exactly the engineers would be doing (when hired).
Established in 2015, Omni acquired $25 million in funding from Ripple in 2018 for its white-label service initiative. At present, it’s not clear whether Omni intends to return the capital raised back to its supporters.
