With a $125 million investment round, Rent the Runway is now valued at over $1 billion. The female unicorn club just got a little bigger.
Rent the Runway has achieved unicorn status. Today, it announces a $125 million investment from institutional investors like Franklin Templeton, Bain Capital, and T. Rowe Price–along with existing lead investors–bringing the company’s total investment to $337 million. This new funding values the company at $1 billion.
Jennifer Hyman, Rent the Runway’s cofounder and CEO, is now part of an exclusive club of female CEOs running empires valued at more than $1 billion. This includes Stitch Fix’s Katrina Lake, 23andMe’s Anne Wokcicki, and Houzz’s Adi Tatarko. This week, Glossier’s Emily Weiss became part of this cohort, thanks to new Series D funding round. And Forbes estimates that Kylie Jenner’s cosmetic company is worth $900 million which means her net worth is now $1 billion.
When Hyman cofounded Rent the Runway in 2009 with her Harvard Business School classmate Jennifer Fleiss, the idea was to offer women rentable fancy gowns and dresses for events so they did not have to buy them. In 2016, Rent the Runway announced that it was profitable. That same year, Hyman decided to expand the company’s offerings to everyday clothes via a new program called Unlimited. “The primary use case that we knew women wanted was going to work because of the financial tax that is placed on female professionals to have variety in their wardrobe,” she says.
www.fastcompany.com
0 comments:
Join the Conversation