Investors
The Long Road to Rentiful
Rentiful looks like an AI company. It isn't.
It is the product of four decades of watching every major technology transition reshape markets, from the early web to mobile to cloud and now AI. Two founders who have spent their careers recognising these shifts before they became obvious, building during them, and later helping large organisations adapt to them.
This is not our first platform shift. It is simply the first time we have applied those lessons to renting.
Why renting, and why us
Every career leaves you with one obsession. Mine became trust.
Whether someone is booking a holiday, renting a car, checking into a hotel or finding an apartment, the pattern is the same. People are not buying software. They are trying to make an important decision, often one of the biggest of their year.
Technology matters because it helps people make better decisions. That is what Rentiful is, and everything in the four decades behind it has been pointing this way.
Jonathan Greensted
Forty years of arriving early
Jonathan has been building things for as long as he has been allowed to. He founded his first company, Sirius Designs, while still at college in 1986. In 1992 he graduated top of his class and won the Lucas Prize for the best final year project. A year later he founded Sentient with Dr Nick Francis and John Vaudin, a bespoke software and consultancy business he ran profitably for eighteen years, from 1993 to 2010, for clients across banking, telecoms and pharmaceuticals, including Microsoft, AstraZeneca, Pfizer and the Ministry of Defence.
That is where the obsession started. Not with technology, but with customers, and with the unglamorous discipline of having to win and keep them, year after year, through good markets and bad.
Building through the shifts
What followed was a sequence of technology transitions, and a habit of arriving early to each one.
EnergyBook. Bespoke energy management hardware for Boots, years before anyone used the word IoT. The idea was right. The world was not ready for another decade.
Virgin Interactive. Multimedia and CD-ROM products in the brief, brilliant window before the web swept that whole market away. A first lesson in how quickly a platform can give and then take.
First Tuesday. The original platform that became shorthand for the dotcom boom. It worked because technology had suddenly changed how people connected, not because of the technology itself.
SportDo. A mobile product during Microsoft's Windows Mobile era, when putting software in someone's pocket was still an experiment rather than an assumption.
Dragons' Den. Took SportDo into the Den and spent nearly two hours being grilled by all five Dragons: Peter Jones, Duncan Bannatyne, Rachel Elnaugh, Doug Richard and Simon Woodroffe. They all passed, with Doug Richard the last to fold. Peter Jones thought apps would be a fad, like mobile ringtones.
Bluehoo. A concept on stage around the launch of Microsoft Azure in 2008. Not attending the cloud era. Building in it before it had a name.
The thread running through every venture is the same. The winners were never the incumbents with a tidier version of the old model. They were the people who built for the new one.
Execution at scale
From around 2010, Jonathan moved from building products to helping large organisations adapt to the shifts he had already lived through. As CTO, CIO and board advisor he led technology, digital transformation and customer experience inside Travelodge, the Rank Group, Quintain's £3bn Wembley Park regeneration, Get Living, Legal & General, Lamington Group, Webiny and Trade Classics.
At Quintain, online leasing went from weeks to hours. At Rank, technology strategy and a £115m acquisition were the same conversation. At Get Living and Legal & General, the lesson was that housing is personal, and the best systems are built with residents in the room rather than for them at a distance.
These were not random jobs. They were more than a decade of board-level and executive experience delivering technology at scale inside significant organisations, much of it inside the living sectors that Rentiful now serves.
Forty years of recognising shifts, building during them and helping institutions adapt to them. Rentiful is where all of it converges.
Mark Davies
Building what survives production
If Jonathan's instinct is to recognise a shift, Mark's is to build something that survives it.
Mark started in live broadcast engineering at the BBC, designing in-vision special effects for programmes including Doctor Who and Only Fools and Horses, where the only acceptable standard is that it works in the studio, live, tonight. From there he moved through early embedded and industrial systems, then spent nearly twenty years inside Microsoft, across consulting, enterprise systems, research, operations and Trustworthy Computing, living the company's own transition from desktop software to enterprise and then to cloud.
He went on to found Agilliance and build a career in cloud architecture: Azure and AWS, microservices, IoT and data platforms, and the kind of turnaround work where you are called in once a project is already in trouble. He has been a startup COO. The common thread is reliability. Mark builds technology that holds up in production, at scale, under real-world complexity.
That is exactly the half of the problem a renter never sees, and the half that decides whether an AI agent can actually be trusted.
What it all proves
Two very different people, arriving at the same place by different routes. Across both careers, three things keep proving true.
Technology transitions create new winners. The incumbents rarely make the leap. The people who build for the new model do.
Consumer trust beats technology. In travel, car rental, hospitality and renting, the winner is whoever the customer trusts to help them decide.
Scale teaches execution. Markets are won in production, not in slides.
Jonathan recognises the shift. Mark builds something that survives it. Rentiful needs both.
The road in full
Successive technology waves, leading naturally to Rentiful.
- 1984
BBC
Mark engineers live broadcast special effects, on programmes including Doctor Who and Only Fools and Horses.
- 1986
Sirius Designs
Jonathan founds his first company, while still at college.
- 1992
The Lucas Prize
Graduates top of his class and wins the Lucas Prize for best final year project.
- 1993
Sentient
Bespoke software and consultancy with Dr Nick Francis and John Vaudin, run until 2010, for clients including Microsoft, AstraZeneca and the Ministry of Defence.
- 1994
Microsoft
Mark joins Microsoft, where he will spend nearly twenty years.
- 1995
EnergyBook
Energy management hardware for Boots, years before anyone said IoT.
- 1996
Virgin Interactive
Multimedia and CD-ROM, in the last window before the web.
- 1998
First Tuesday
The original platform that came to symbolise the dotcom boom.
- 2005
SportDo and the Dragons' Den
A Windows Mobile app, taken into the Den. Peter Jones thought apps would be a fad, like ringtones.
- 2008
Bluehoo and Azure
Building in the cloud before it was mainstream.
- 2010
Execution at scale
Board and executive technology roles across Travelodge, Rank, Quintain, Get Living and Legal & General.
- 2014
Agilliance
Mark leaves Microsoft to architect cloud systems for startups and enterprises.
- 2023
Rentiful
Four decades of lessons, applied to renting.
- 2026
AI
The next platform shift. This time, early on purpose.
We have spent four decades watching technology reshape markets.
Each transition created new winners, because customer expectations changed faster than incumbents could. We recognised those transitions, repeatedly.
We believe renting has reached that point. Rentiful is the company our combined careers have been leading towards.
Talk to us
If you would like to talk, I would be glad to hear from you.
WhatsApp is usually the quickest way to reach us.