NEW YORK — Furniture resale platform Kaiyo, which is the online name for a company called Furnishare, is preparing to close operations according to an article in The City.
Customers this week received an email that said, “Currently, Furnishare DBA Kaiyo is in the initial phase of doing an orderly wind down of the company. Due to the current situation, we are not able to complete your payout at this time. In due course, you will receive information on how to file a claim.”
According to The City, users who have sold their furniture on the platform have shared complaints online in recent weeks, alleging that Kaiyo has withheld their payments. One said that the company told her that her $172.25 payment for a bed frame sold on the platform would take seven to 10 business days to process. After that time elapsed without payment, she reached out to customer service who told her that Kaiyo was “experiencing delays with cashing out” and could not provide a date for when the issue would be resolved.
A spokesperson for the office of New York State Attorney General Letitia James confirmed to The City that its office received complaints and is reviewing them.
Kaiyo was founded by Alpay Koralturk in 2015.
“I already had the startup bug, and this was another problem to solve,” Koralturk told Furniture Today’s sister publication Home Accents Today in 2022. “We started out servicing Manhattan and called the company Furnishare since we only rented used furniture, which was a novel concept at the time. We are now in New York, Philadelphia, Washington D.C. and Baltimore, and we recently launched in Los Angeles and plan to expand up and down the West Coast.”
Kaiyo had raised $36 million in its Series B, bringing its funding to nearly $50 million. By growing to new markets and making it fast and convenient to buy or sell secondhand furniture, Kaiyo had hoped to drive participation in the circular economy.
According to Koralturk’s LinkedIn profile, he left the company in April.
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