After she had her first child, Fauve Doucet remembers looking around her Montréal condo and realizing how much stuff she had; things were so crowded she didn’t even have room for a bike for her son.
“It’s another way of looking at the economy that considers all the social and environmental components.”
Fauve Doucet
Partage Club
So, instead of buying a bike, she asked her neighbour if her son could borrow one. The mutually beneficial agreement reminded her of a concept she learned in business school: the sharing economy, which could act as a bulwark against climate change by limiting demand for disposable, mass-produced items.
“This is where it started in my mind that we needed to think differently,” Doucet said in an interview with BetaKit on Thursday.
In just a few years, Doucet turned the idea into the community item-lending app Partage Club (sharing club in English). On Nov. 18, she announced a $2.1-million seed round led by local investor Frédéric Bastien, with participation from BDC Thrive Lab, Desjardins’s Startup in Residence program, Mistral Ventures, and other angel investors. After winning Startup of the Year at Montréal’s Startup Community Awards in 2024, it has now onboarded hundreds of users and has partnerships with more than a dozen cities and municipalities across Québec.
The app functions as a type of Facebook Marketplace with one rule: no selling. Opening it in a central Montréal neighbourhood gives you a sense of the big-ticket items people need for maybe just one or two uses: a ladder, board games like Scrabble, or a sled for toddlers to race down the hill at Parc Jeanne-Mance. There are also more unconventional lending items: a room in someone’s house near a metro station, offered for people unable to get home due to the city’s recent transit strike.
In a world where people are inundated with stuff, Partage Club is selling itself as an opportunity to turn social connections into a positive economic force.
“It’s another way of looking at the economy that considers all the social and environmental components,” Doucet said.
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Partage Club conducted a study in partnership with Sanjith Gopalakrishnan, an assistant professor at McGill University’s Desautels Faculty of Management, to evaluate the app’s potential environmental, economic, and social impact. According to their analysis, each time a neighbour shares an item through the app, it’s equivalent to $58 in average savings per user, and 238 grams of waste reduction (or about 11 plastic, 1.5-litre bottles). Over an academic year, Partage Club users borrowing items saved an estimated 400 kilograms of waste. But there’s a way to go: according to the 2025 Global Waste Index, the average Canadian generates 694 kilograms of waste per year.
The startup relies on venture money, but that money comes with an inherent tension: investors expect big returns, but the Partage Club business model promotes anti-consumerism. Despite the contradiction, Partage Club claims it’s been profitable since last year. What started out mostly as an individual consumer model has evolved to selling licenses to city and municipal governments, which they can offer for free to their constituents. The model also works for property managers, educational institutions, organizations, and businesses. Individuals can still try the app for free for three weeks, then pay $60 per year or $8 per month for access.
Doucet said they raised the money to expand across Canada and internationally, double the team in the next year, and add features to “gamify” the user experience. The company is using artificial intelligence (AI) to improve its algorithm to show users related items from those it’s borrowed.
But Doucet cautioned that the team is “responsible” about how it’s using AI. As the technology increasingly powers the online shopping experience for consumers, she anticipates that Partage Club will provide a welcome contrast for people looking for a more human-centric experience.
“We’re betting on community,” she said.
Feature image courtesy Partage Club.