PartsTech

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Founder: Gregory Kirber
Founding: 2013
Mission: PartsTech helps automotive repair shops find the right parts and tires fast
Employees: 90 & 10% Local
Workplace: Remote
Stage & Capital Raised: Series B & $10M – $30M raised (estimated, amount unannounced)
Investors: Insight Partners & OpenView
Key Customers: NAPA Auto Parts, O’Reilly AutoParts, AutoZone, Advance Auto Parts, etc.
Glassdoor Rating: 5.0
Valuation (estimated): +$200M (assuming they sold ~20% of the company in an average $10M-$20M Series B fundraise)
^ this is a useless number. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!

Think of PartsTech as the “Kayak for aftermarket auto procurement”. They match auto shops with major suppliers like Napa Auto Parts, AutoZone, Advance Auto Parts & others to get custom parts through large distribution channels to individual auto shops faster, cheaper, and more efficiently. If you got your brake pads or rotors fixed recently, there’s a good chance they were purchased through PartsTech.

The startup was founded in Cambridge in 2013 by Gregory Kirber and soon joined by founding team members Erik St. Pierre & Olexy Sadovy. Greg, PartsTech’s Founder & CEO, grew up around auto shops and has lived in the after care auto business for most of his life. He worked in a Mercedes Benz dealership in Norwood, MA on the automile, and later opened his own repair shop on the Dedham-Hyde Park line. Greg wasted an immeasurable amount of time on the phone calling up national distributors to source parts for repairs. You would think there was an easier way. But at the time there was no B2B e-commerce solution for the auto business. Not only was more than 50% of his day spent on the phone, but more than 20% of the parts that showed up were not the right fit. Greg got his MBA & JD at UConn, where he took the time to go deep down the entrepreneurial rabbit hole to solve this aftermarket auto procurement issue.

Let’s say “Ray” owns a local auto shop and needs to restock some supplies. He calls up his supplier over at Callahan Auto Parts. Well, he probably needs to call at least two suppliers to make sure he’s keeping his parts discovery honest because Tommy Callahan doesn’t always have the details handy. For both of those calls he might wait on hold for 5 minutes. Then he chats with Tommy for another 5 because he likes to hear how the kids are doing. Finally you get your price and everything ordered. Great! Except then the wrong parts arrive. Now you’ve got to call back to repeat the same process as before. Except you’re on hold again. There are two customers in the lobby. This whole process is costing you time, money, and your sanity. Oh, and I forgot to mention – you’ve got a car on the lift the whole time, which doesn’t have wheels on it anymore and you can’t take off to do a new job until the correct parts arrive. A double whammy.

Sourcing parts the old way over the phone has major hidden costs. There’s a time savings calculator on the Parts Tech website that details this problem starkly. For a shop servicing 10 vehicles per day over a 5 day work week, manual sourcing could cost the shop an additional 650 hours and $13,000 per year. That’s crazy!

The PartsTech team set out to build a software platform for auto shops so small businesses could more easily obtain the right part for the right car with the right shipment data. The PartsTech platform helps these shops automate the ordering process and more easily obtain parts at competitive prices from major distributors so they can spend less time on the phone and more time fixing cars to keep their customers happy.

Today they have 27,000 supplier locations and millions of products on the platform focused on shop preference, availability, and delivery times. An accumulating advantage for a rapidly growing marketplace. PartsTech, like most marketplaces, tracks GMV (gross merchandise value) as their north star metric. And in Q1 of this year they’re on track to hit their goal early! They’re also watching the number of active auto shops on the platform, average order size, and other leading indicators of platform health.

That somewhat neatly summarizes PartsTech and the problems they’re trying to solve for the auto industry. But like any startup there’s a whole other category that helps define startup success: company building. Parts Tech is a remote workforce and CTO Olexy Sadovy helped recruit the entire engineering team, almost half of their workforce, from his home country in Eastern Europe. Ukraine. Imagine a software business beginning to inflect as your whole physical world is shifting rapidly under your feet. PartsTech’s engineering team was put in the crosshairs almost a year ago to the day. Literally.

PartsTech’s VP of People, Kate Caton-Noyes, recalled the chaotic rush last February: “We offered to move our team members anywhere, send resources, and offered any other aid they needed. We looked at chartering buses through Poland and offered to help evacuate team members through Georgia. But the vast majority stayed.” Any other HR leaders have that in their job description? Unprecedented! 

Today PartsTech has an engineering hub in Lisbon, Portugal too so team members have another European location farther away from live fire they can access if needed. The team plans to continue to hire engineering roles out of both Lisbon and Ukraine for the foreseeable future. We’ll all be thinking of the Parts Tech team in the days and months ahead no doubt. PartsTech is getting the U.S. team together in April (in a warm location) which I’m sure will be an important time to bring people together. We’re all praying for the safety of their Ukrainian team members for as long as it takes to bring peace to their country. 

A few final notes about the Parts Tech platform. It’s free to use. They pass a ton of value to auto shops as their main source of monetization is from the major distributors at the transaction level. And with their growing ability to aggregate supplier volume they’re able to pass those savings on to the small businesses they serve. They’re also experimenting with some premium features for auto shops this coming year like onboarding additional tire suppliers, analytics, premium quoting features, and additional support capabilities for larger PartsTech customers.

Last, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Parts Tech’s CFO CJ Gustafon has a pretty cool newsletter called Mostly Metrics he writes in his spare time. You should check out if you want to learn more about startups, business metrics, and everything in between!

Operators to Know (Locally):

With the team remote & emerging company stage I included some execs but kept the spotlight on the local team. And my investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the PartsTech team I’m sure I missed many operators internally

Key Roles To Be Hired:

If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:

  • What are some key ways Parts Tech fosters collaboration with a remote workforce?
  • How does PartsTech balance communication between a European engineering team with an American GTM & Operations team?
  • What are the most important factors driving PartsTech’s marketplace growth and success over the next 12-18 months?
  • What areas of product or team expansion will PartsTech focus on over the next 12-18 months?

We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about PartsTech you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more automotive shops into the digital age. All road warriors applaud your efforts. See you around Cambridge and on the interwebs!

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