Three years ago I opened a new rental house. Before we rented a single camera, I went to visit the best rental companies I could find to learn how they did it.

Every one of them handled new customers differently. Different application forms, different fraud checks, different rental policies. It's 2026, and there is still no industry standard for what works and what doesn't. Paperwork is still king. PDFs still get filled out by hand. Verifying a new customer still eats hours, and everyone has a different opinion on how to do it.

So we followed what the others were doing and believed we were doing our very best.

Six months after we opened, a Sony Burano package with lenses was stolen from us by someone impersonating a real customer.

We joined every industry organization we could, PERG included, and found that other rental houses were dealing with the same fraud. I still see people being stolen from today.

So we went to work building a system for ourselves: layered checks that catch what a busy counter misses, and that make the job faster and easier for our team. It worked well enough that keeping it to ourselves stopped making sense.

Along the way we kept doing what every rental house does. We called our friends in the business and asked, "Have you rented to this person before?" That phone call should be part of the software: known good customers and known bad ones, shared between the rental houses that need to know.

That's how the idea was born.

Founder, VouchPoint