Flexe CEO Karl Siebricht.
Flexe CEO Karl Siebricht.

Flexe announced $4.4 million in funding on Thursday as the hot Seattle startup gets ready to expand its marketplace that acts like Airbnb for warehouse space.

Just like the sharing economy has let homeowners turn spare bedrooms into supplemental income, Flexe wants to let warehouse owners rent out empty space on a month-to-month basis.

The company says the storage industry is notoriously seasonal, and they’re the first startup to offer this kind of solution. They’re doing it with a simple online marketplace where organizations looking for storage can search based on location, pallet size and the amount of space needed.

flexe442“As the pioneers of this model, and with the scale they’ve already achieved in building their network of more than 200 warehouses, we believe that Flexe is positioned for long-term category leadership and could become a business on the scale of AirBnb or Amazon Web Services,” former Microsoft executive and Flexe investor Fritz Lanman said in a Thursday press release.

The funding, which came from Lanman, Hank Vigil, Second Avenue Partners and SV Angel, brings the 2-year-old startup’s total funding to $6.3 million. The company was founded in 2013 by former aQuantive and AdReady executive Karl Siebrecht.

It plans to use the money to keep growing the business through increased investment in technology development as well as marketing and customer service.

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