OGDEN, Utah--(BUSINESS WIRE)--CampusBookRentals.com, a trailblazer and leader in the growing online textbook rental market, announced a round of growth financing with total equity and credit facilities raised of over $20 million. Lead investors included Level Equity, Five Elms Capital and Cherokee & Walker.
“While we have built a capital efficient business that has been profitable since shortly after we founded it, we chose to bring on an equity partner and further develop our financing relationships to meet the incredible demand we are seeing in our market. We are well capitalized to execute on the significant growth opportunities we see in this expanding market,” said CampusBookRentals.com CEO Alan Martin, who launched CampusBookRentals.com from his basement in 2007. “We’ve had an extremely flattering, if not somewhat overwhelming, amount of interest in the business with approaches from numerous financial and strategic investors. We chose to partner with Level Equity, along with Five Elms Capital and Cherokee & Walker, as they understand our business well and provide us smart capital and great relationships within our space.”
Confirmation of the latest investment round came as CampusBookRentals.com received the No. 1 ranking on MountainWest Capital Network’s “2010 Utah Emerging Elite” list and No. 4 on Utah Valley Entrepreneurial Forum’s (UVEF) Top 25 Under 5. The company recently moved for the fifth time in four years into a new 57,000 square foot facility to support its continued growth to over 100 current employees, up from 30 a year ago, with plans to add additional staffers in the months to come.
CampusBookRentals.com has also recently added e-commerce veteran Scott Klossner, Chief Operating & Financial Officer at Backcountry.com, to its Board of Directors. Klossner, with more than 25 years of financial and executive expertise, will play a key role in helping guide the company’s future growth.
“We were attracted to CampusBookRentals.com’s outstanding, consistent and profitable growth as well as a unique and highly capital efficient business model,” said Ben Levin, a founder and Partner of Level Equity. “Alan and his team have quietly captured significant market share in the textbook rental market with a simple formula of providing students the cheapest textbook alternative and relentlessly focusing on customer service. Students that rent from CBR rent again and again and they tell their friends. Alan is a business model and product innovator in the large and rapidly evolving market for physical and digital texts and supplemental content which represents the second largest expense to tuition for millions of college students.”
About CampusBookRentals.com
CampusBookRentals.com serves a growing number of customers on nearly 5,600 college campuses. Students simply search for textbooks by ISBN, title, author or keyword; select their books and appropriate rental period (semester, quarter, summer, etc.); and take advantage of free shipping to and from their home or college dorm. For every book rented, CampusBookRentals.com donates a portion of its proceeds to Operation Smile, a non-profit organization dedicated to providing cleft lip correction surgeries for children in need. So far in 2011 alone, CampusBookRentals.com has provided for over 325 such operations.