About Final Rentals

Based in Cardiff, Final Rentals is a global car rental franchise and technology platform operating across more than 65 countries and 500 locations across five continents. Its platform connects travellers with local car rental companies and provides independent operators with the booking technology and digital tools they need to compete in international markets.

CEO and founder, Ammar Akhtar, identified the opportunity to make vehicle rental more accessible for customers and rental companies alike after spending several years building websites for well-known car rental companies like Budget Rent a Car and Thrifty. Ammar says that it quickly became clear that a significant proportion of the car rental industry was made up of smaller, local firms that didn’t have access to the resources required to compete with the bigger, international players.

Final Rentals was founded in January 2019, driven, says Ammar, by “the idea that I'm going to empower these local companies”. Since then, the company has gone from strength to strength. Winner of the FinTech Scale-up of the Year 2025, this year alone Final Rentals has expanded into three new territories (two in Italy, plus Armenia), increased bookings by 200% and received an array of nominations including in the Fintech Awards Wales 2026, the Business in Wales Awards 2026 and the Lloyds British Business Excellence Awards 2026.

The plan for the coming year is to maintain growth at similar levels, focus attention on expanding the sales team and investing in further Intellectual Property (IP) development.

The Challenge

Since its launch, Final Rentals has conducted several funding rounds and sourced seed equity from angel and venture funds, which Ammar found relatively easy to come by. By March 2024, Final Rentals was growing rapidly, and it was time to source further finance; but Ammar had become concerned over the long-term costs and dilutive nature involved with equity funding.

Through its Cardiff-based NatWest Accelerator Hub, NatWest has been supporting entrepreneurs, start-ups, and scale-up businesses across Wales to start, grow and scale for more than a decade. The Accelerator provides coaching, peer-to-peer support, expert insight, and access to networks that help ambitious businesses realise their growth potential.

Ammar joined the NatWest Accelerator in Cardiff in 2022 and quickly became an active member of the community, sharing his own experiences with fellow entrepreneurs through mentoring sessions and speaking engagements.

He credits this community and the connections he consequently made with the NatWest team, specifically NatWest Relationship Director, Louis Spencer, as the starting point for his IP-backed loan application process.

Louis Spencer, Relationship Director, NatWest, said:

Ammar has been a fantastic example of the type of ambitious, innovative entrepreneur we are proud to support through the NatWest Accelerator.

We've seen Final Rentals grow from a promising Welsh technology business into a global platform operating in more than 65 countries. The IP-backed loan was designed specifically to help fast-growing businesses unlock the value of their intellectual property, and Final Rentals is a strong example of how innovative companies can use that value to support their next phase of growth.

Louis Spencer - NatWest Relationship Director

The Solution

The NatWest High Growth IP-backed loan offers IP-rich scaleup SMEs the opportunity to borrow anything from £250,000 to £10m. Inngot’s sophisticated online IP identification and valuation toolkit is used as part of the process to document the qualifying intangible assets a company owns and determine how much that IP is worth. Loans are subsequently secured against up to 50% of that IP value, making it possible for companies with few tangible assets but rich in high quality and valuable intangible assets, like software, trademarks, copyrights, and patents, to access the funding to continue to grow.

The funding also represents an important milestone for the innovation ecosystem in Wales. Final Rentals became the first Welsh business to secure funding through NatWest's IP-backed lending proposition, highlighting the growing strength of Wales’s technology and innovation sector and demonstrating how intellectual property can be used to support business growth.

For Ammar, NatWest’s loan proposition was a “no-brainer - the good thing is you don’t actually give away equity, so you can unlock value from something you’ve already built without giving up part of the business. It gives us the capital to keep investing in our technology, which in turn creates more IP and more value. I think it’s a very clever way of fundraising.”

Ammar says that Inngot’s online toolkit is “massively functional” with “very friendly and very fast” support from Inngot’s in-house experts.

As an added bonus, the process helped the company to identify and remedy shortcomings in its IP management processes by forcing Ammar and his team to review their current IP governance practices.

One key lesson he learned was that “the documentation of our IP is very important. You can build the coolest thing on earth, but if it’s not documented properly, then the value will be different than when it’s an average piece of technology that’s documented well.”

Ammar says that using Inngot’s tools highlighted this area for improvement, so he and his tech team went back to the drawing board to design and implement IP documentation processes, which are running smoothly and efficiently today.

Having secured a six-figure sum through the Nat-West IP-backed loan, Ammar says that “over the next few months, some of the funding will be used to invest further in AI, GPUs and technology, which will help us develop more IP and increase the value of what we’ve already built. It creates a virtuous cycle of investment and growth - the more we invest in our technology, the more IP we create and the greater value we can build in the business.”

The Result

Six-figure High-Growth IP-backed loan approved by NatWest

Final Rentals successfully secured a six-figure NatWest High Growth IP-backed loan, becoming the first Welsh business to access the funding proposition. The investment will support the company's continued international expansion, further development of its technology platform and ongoing investment in AI and intellectual property. The funding also demonstrates the important role innovative finance can play in helping high-growth Welsh businesses scale without diluting ownership.

Asked if he would recommend the NatWest IP Loan proposition to other SMEs and scaleups, Ammar responded:

Absolutely. I’d say this can be a no-brainer for a company that’s at growth stage. If you’ve got valuable IP sitting in the business, why not use that to unlock funding while keeping your equity?

The support we've received from NatWest has gone beyond funding. Being part of the Cardiff Accelerator community helped us build connections, challenge our thinking, and access expertise at key stages of our growth journey. The IP-backed loan is another example of the bank backing innovative businesses with ambitions to scale internationally.

Ammar Akhtar - Founder and CEO