14 Years of InnoVent: Extending the Life of Assets, Expanding What’s Possible

Fourteen years ago, three business partners and I set out to build a challenger in a crowded UK IT financial services leasing market.

We took our lead from two of those partners, the original entrepreneurs from South Africa who, nine years earlier, had started the original InnoVent. The idea was simple but ambitious: give customers a capital-light way to rent IT assets for three years, take those assets back while they still had life left, refurbish them to as-good-as-new condition, and rent them again to a second-life customer at a fraction of the price.

The early years in the UK were tough. Preserving and protecting the capital, financing and supplier partnerships needed to fund and manage full asset lifecycles took real graft. But it paid off, it gave us a recurring revenue model built on genuine efficiency, not just providing finance.

Fourteen years on, we're still finding new asset types that can support a second, even a third life. That simple idea - extending the lifecycle - has shaped everything: how efficiently we use external capital, the remarketing skills we've had to master, and the case for building our own refurbishment and rental capability in-house.

Now we're bringing renewable assets into the mix. Solar and battery technologies are maturing fast, and grid-avoiding generation and storage solutions are scaling up. As they do, we're asking the same question we've always asked: how do we repurpose and reposition an asset once its first life is done?

We believe the ceiling on use-and-reuse is really just the ceiling on our own ambition -finding the right customers, mastering the refurbishment of middle-aged assets, and helping new markets see how their capital can be preserved by combining it with ours.

At its heart, InnoVent has always been about one thing -helping clients acquire the right assets, for the right price, for the right length of time and being open to handing them back for a second life that works for someone else.

Fourteen years in, I'm more convinced than ever that doing more with the same resources, for longer, is a model with plenty of road still ahead.

Here's to the next chapter.

Duane Lent
CEO