He looked at the rental yard - the forklifts, the scissor lifts, the dusty paper ledgers - and saw a software category waiting to be built.
Andy Feis - the consultant who traded slide decks for excavators.
Walk into most equipment rental yards in America and you will find a thriving business operating on phone calls, spreadsheets, and handwritten tickets. The excavators move. The invoices lag. Andy Feis built a company around the gap between those two facts.
Renterra, the company he co-founded in 2022 and runs as CEO, is a cloud-based operating system for rental companies - the businesses that supply construction sites, infrastructure projects, and local contractors with the heavy machinery they cannot afford to own. The platform handles booking, contracts, payments, inspections, maintenance, and analytics, accessible on any device, with a mobile app built for the field rather than the back office.
By early 2026 it served hundreds of rental companies across the United States and Canada and facilitated hundreds of millions of dollars in annual rental transactions. In January of that year, Renterra closed a $9 million Series A led by Avenue Growth Partners, pushing total funding to roughly $16 million.
Feis frames the opportunity in plain terms. Rental businesses, he says, are "the backbone of construction, infrastructure and local economies, yet they've historically been underserved by technology." The thesis is not glamorous. It is enormous.
We're building the platform that will define how this industry operates for the next decade, with AI playing a practical role in helping rental companies win. Andy Feis - Co-Founder & CEO, Renterra
The path to heavy equipment ran through some unlikely places. Before Renterra, Feis founded TeethTrack, a technology-driven dental product, and Dancematch Corporation, a platform for organizing high school dances. Neither obviously points toward forklifts. Both point toward a habit: he keeps starting things.
He sharpened the analytical side at Stanford, earning a B.S. in Management Science and Engineering with Distinction and Phi Beta Kappa honors. Then came Ringleader Ventures, where as a venture analyst he reviewed deal flow for more than 200 startups - a crash course in what separates a real business from a good pitch.
From 2017 to 2022 he was at Bain & Company, climbing from associate consulting intern to consultant. Then he left the comfort of one of the world's most prestigious consultancies to build software for an industry most of his peers had never thought about. That choice is the whole story.
Joins the management consultancy, advancing from associate consulting intern to consultant over five years.
Teams up with co-founder Nick Hibberd to build a modern operating system for equipment rental. Becomes CEO.
Renterra announces new funding to grow its rental operating system and launch an integrated online storefront.
Avenue Growth Partners leads the round. The company doubles down on AI and hiring across engineering, product, customer success, and go-to-market.
While founders chase the next consumer app, Feis went to the rental yard. The least digitized corners of the economy are exactly where modern software has the most room to run.
Not AI for the press release. AI that helps a rental company market more effectively, automate inspections, and make better decisions at scale - the boring wins that compound.
"This investment gives us the fuel to move even faster and think even bigger." For Feis, capital is permission to compress a decade of category-building into a few years.
Renterra's raises tell a tidy story: a seed-stage proof point in 2024, then a Series A that more than tripled it. The compounding total reflects a company moving from "interesting idea" to "category contender" - and a CEO who keeps making the case that rental software deserves serious capital.
The investors agree. Avenue Growth Partners' Ryan Russell described a team that combines deep industry expertise with modern software development - the rare blend that lets a company become fundamental to the sector it serves.
His founder resume spans dentistry, high school dances, and heavy machinery. The common thread is not the market - it is the instinct to build.
As a VC analyst he vetted deal flow for over 200 startups before building one of his own. He knew exactly what he was signing up for.
Renterra is headquartered in Chicago - close to the construction and infrastructure customers it serves, far from the usual startup echo chamber.