DriveSimple has secured £1.5m in fresh funding and appointed Andrea Romano as chief executive officer to drive the expansion of its flexible van subscription model across the UK.

The latest funding round is led by Calm Media Investments, with continued support from DriveSimple’s existing shareholders.

The new investment brings the company’s total capital raised to £4.5m and will support plans to disrupt the UK’s c.£4bn van leasing market. The start-up currently operates a fleet of approximately 500 vehicles across the UK, with plans to use the capital to scale its inventory, introduce electric vehicles and enhance its proprietary technology platform.

DriveSimple provides new vans to tradespeople, delivery operators and SMEs through a flexible subscription model designed to sit between traditional leasing and vehicle ownership. Customers commit for a minimum of six months, with a three-month break clause, giving businesses the ability to adjust their vehicle requirements as their workloads change.

The competitive, all-inclusive pricing model covers servicing and maintenance, alongside a streamlined sign-up and delivery process that can get vans to customers within five days.

The model is designed to take the long-term risk out of commercial vehicle leasing. While vehicle requirements for SMEs can change significantly from month to month, traditional four-year leases can lock operators into a vehicle and monthly cost.

Driving this model is a proprietary AI-powered customer vetting and underwriting engine, which has been developed to transform the process that remains heavily reliant on manual assessment across much of the commercial vehicle market.

The technology enables DriveSimple to assess customers more quickly and consistently, and make credit and underwriting decisions significantly faster than traditional manual processes.

This means businesses can receive a decision without the delays that can accompany conventional commercial vehicle finance – while also enabling DriveSimple to consider customers who may be declined by traditional lessors or face lengthy assessment processes.

Customer data is anonymised within the system, with data privacy and security built into the platform.

Andrea Romano, CEO of DriveSimple, said: “We are delighted to secure the funding for the next mile in our journey. Over the next few months, we will focus on making our technology even more robust to give our customers the flexibility they need, without compromising on data security.

“Our technology is not simply there to make an existing process slightly more efficient. It changes the economics of the model. By automating and improving underwriting, we can make faster, more consistent decisions and serve customers who are poorly served by traditional processes. That’s what gives us the ability to scale the subscription model rather than simply run a fleet business.”