There’s a particular kind of entrepreneur who hunts constraints. Where others see limitations as problems, they see them as moats to build. Geetansh Bamania is that kind. At Rentomojo, the furniture and appliances rental business he founded in 2015, every customer promise creates an internal constraint. Cancel anytime? He absorbs the churn risk. Free relocation? He needs warehouses in every city. Flexible ownership? He must carry hundreds of crores in fixed assets. His customers get freedom because he accepts none.
The wiring started early. In 10th standard, Bamania’s math tutor posed a problem to the class. Everyone else applied the standard theorem. Bamania, bad with memory, spent two days proving it from scratch. “I went against the tide to prove that theorem,” he recalls. “It took me more time but I could see that lens of reverse engineering.” His tutor paid him Rs 500 for solving what others wouldn’t dare to attempt. In Bamania’s mind, this had set in a permanent impression: the harder the path to solve a problem, the sweeter the reward.
Fresh out of IIT Madras in 2012 with a mechanical engineering degree and a project in neural networks, Bamania took his first job at KPMG in Bangalore. His starting salary was Rs 27,000. To furnish his rental apartment, he took a Rs 2 lakh loan. Over the next three years, he moved through four cities and six houses. Each time, he either hauled furniture across state lines, costing Rs 30,000- Rs 40,000, or sold it at throwaway prices, watching his Rs 2 lakh evaporate.
The turning point came in 2014. When moving into an apartment in Mumbai, Bamania found a small manufacturer on Yari Road who offered furniture on monthly rent. Over 18 months, Bamania had handed over just Rs 20,000 in rentals to furnish his apartment. Curious about the economics, he invited the man over for tea. What he learned would form the basis of Rentomojo.
Bamania was the third tenant to use the same sofa, bed, and washing machine. The manufacturer had converted each product worth around Rs 10,000 into Rs 30,000 by renting it repeatedly over multiple cycles. On a typical marketplace, that same product would have generated a one-time margin of Rs 3,000. Here, the margin kept regenerating.
But the model was primitive. Contracts were rigid — six months payment upfront, sometimes 12. No repairs. No relocation help. If you wanted out early, you lost your deposit — the very flexibility rental should offer was absent.
But for a generation increasingly non-committal, ownership had become a liability. Bamania, however, saw this as an opportunity to commit to a venture. In April 2015, he launched Rentomojo with a deceptively simple pitch: furnish your apartment for under Rs 6,500 a month. Cancel anytime. Free repairs. Free relocation. Upgrade whenever your salary jumped.
Delivering on those promises required building three businesses at once. Rentomojo wasn’t just a subscription platform; it also needed to be an e-commerce operation with warehouses, delivery fleets, technicians, and carpenters across cities. It also needed refurbishment centres—mini-factories that cleaned, repaired, and reupholstered returned products to be rented again. Managing product lifecycles became critical. The longer a sofa stayed rentable, the better the unit economics.
Then came the capital problem. How do you convince a lender that chairs and beds will generate recurring revenue over seven years? The initial money – Rs 4 crore – came through crowdfunding, but Accel and Chiratae Ventures came in as early equity investors shortly afterwards, followed by Bain Capital Ventures.
By early 2020, Rentomojo was three to four months from profitability. Then Covid-19 hit, and the four-month runway to profitability shrank to a four-month survival window. But Rentomojo used the crisis to rebuild from the inside. It had been paying Rs 20 lakh a month for a route optimisation software that planned deliveries and pickups. Bamania’s team built it in-house, cutting the cost to almost nil. They replaced their expensive off-the-shelf ticketing system — used for repair requests and internal workflows—with a homegrown solution. Risk assessment models, once 20-30% automated, were bumped up to 70-80%.
By the end of FY23, the company posted a profit of Rs 6.2 crore on a revenue of Rs 123.3 crore. In FY25 (unaudited estimates),net profit reportedly hit Rs 40 crore with gross rental revenue crossing Rs 325 crore and Ebitda jumping to Rs 92 crore.
Today, it manages over 220,000 active subscribers with an average tenure of 18 months, and has more than 750,000 products deployed at an 85% deployment rate. As of end of FY24, the company is estimated to have commanded over 50% market share in the organised furniture and appliance rental segment. The company which has raised close to Rs 400 crore in equity till date, is eyeing an IPO in mid-2026.
Looking ahead, there is still room for growth as India’s furniture market remains barely penetrated by rental models. As urbanisation accelerates and property prices outpace incomes, the 20-30-year-old demographic that demand freedom will only expand. Rentomojo, as Bamania puts it, will willingly carry the weight.