Steve Case and his Revolution fund for startups will gross about $96 million in the sale of car-sharing service Zipcar to Avis Budget Group, a deal that validated his early backing in the industry.
Case, the co-founder of America Online, invested in car sharing in the mid-2000s, when the business model was still untested. By August 2012, his fund was the largest shareholder in Cambridge, Mass.-based Zipcar, which rents cars by the hour or the day in cities and on college campuses.
The success with Zipcar reinforces Revolution’s stated goal of investing in startups designed to disrupt established business.
The Zipcar exit will be among the largest for the fund, created in 2005, said a person familiar with Revolution’s finances who wasn’t authorized to talk publicly about them.