Sigvi raises €1.2M to expand automated car rental operations

Car rental has always felt like the clunky cousin of travel booking — counters, paperwork, keys handed over by a bored clerk. Sigvi, a Lithuanian startup, wants to drag that experience into the same era as hotel and flight booking, and it just picked up €1.2 million in pre-seed funding to do it. Superhero Capital led the round, with Vladas Lašas, chairman of the Lithuanian Business Angel Network and a co-founder of the Carbon War Room, joining alongside other angels.

The pitch from founders Vytis Šliažas, Ignas Gibas, and Mindaugas Banaitis is straightforward: Sigvi doesn't own a single car. Instead it plugs into fleets already owned by independent operators and private individuals, then runs the entire rental process through software — dynamic pricing, bookings, keyless entry available around the clock, automated inspections, predictive maintenance scheduling, and customer support. Think of it as the operating layer that a fragmented industry never had.

The company isn't starting from a whiteboard. It launched operations in Poland in June 2026 and already manages more than 200 vehicles, serving a mix of tourists and longer-term renters. That's a modest fleet by the standards of the big international rental brands, but it's real usage, not a pilot deck.

The timing leans on a genuine trend. Eurostat figures show travellers logged nearly 3.1 billion nights in EU tourist accommodation in 2025, and that demand keeps climbing while, as Šliažas points out, a lot of independently owned vehicles sit unused simply because their owners have no easy way to reach renters. Sigvi's argument is that it can connect that idle supply to that swelling demand, and do it roughly 30 percent cheaper than traditional international rental brands by leaning on existing, already-in-circulation vehicles rather than new fleet purchases.

What happens next depends on execution more than vision. Aggregator models live or die on trust — inspections have to be reliable, maintenance has to actually get scheduled, and keyless access has to work every single time a tourist is standing outside an apartment building at midnight. The fresh capital is earmarked for exactly that: sharpening the AI automation and growing the managed vehicle network beyond Poland.