As the sharing economy in the Netherlands matures, startup-initiatives are increasingly becoming commercially driven. Not necessarily a bad thing: they need to make their promises to their investors. Hence, SnappCar, the infamous car sharing platform, banks a mountainous €10M funding round with French car rental behemoth Europcar and existing investors. Barqo, on a smaller scale, closed a successful 400.000 euro-plus crowdfunding campaign, to invest in boat rentals for vacations.Â
Heavily criticized
Over the course of the years, and even quite recently, sharing economy has been heavily criticized. Mainly because it has shifted from a seemingly collaborative way to share goods and services, to an *actual* business category. That, in the eyes of pundits, wasn’t the way it was intended.