One of Ripple's First Multi Million-Dollar Investments Abruptly Shuts Down

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One of Ripple’s first major investments just closed its doors for good.

The San Francisco-based peer-to-peer rental startup Omni has officially ended its services and shut down its website.

Omni was one of the first investments made by Xpring, Ripple’s fundraising and development arm built to invest in, incubate, acquire and provide grants to emerging startups.

Ripple executives led a $25 million fundraising round for Omni back in January of 2018, and Ripple included Omni in its list of initial companies supported by Xpring.

Omni’s service was designed to give people a way to rent items from one another using cash or the digital asset XRP. In a letter posted online, Omni thanks its supporters while citing the difficulties involved in getting a startup off the ground.

“Since 2014, we’ve been committed to giving you access to the things you need when you need them, encouraging communities to share more and buy less. We’ve been honored to work with small businesses and the communities they serve.

After deep consideration, we’ve made the difficult decision to close our platform and end operations.

More than anything, we want to say thank you to our customers, partners and community who have shown us a tremendous amount of love and support over the last five and a half years. Thank you for including Omni in life’s big moments, from birthday parties to family reunions to Friendsgivings, and joining us in an effort to reduce waste and enable more conscious consumerism. It’s been wonderful to share our dream with you and we hope you continue to seek out ways to access more and buy less.”

Before closing its doors, Omni reportedly reached a deal with Coinbase to sell its engineering team to the US crypto exchange.

Coinbase says it’s too early to reveal what the team will be working on.