As serial Entrepreneur Joel Milne installed, scaled, and then successfully sold the mobile auto repair service startup repairmith for autonomy, he was suffering from a constant problem.
There is a communication problem in the automotive retail industry. And it is a expensive. Thousands of dealerships and mechanic shops – each with an array of a software system – lacks a common language to communicate with manufacturers and other businesses.
“We had this problem,” how do you work with dealerships and shops and talk to them because you are trying to repair cars and get them trading or getting parts from them? ” “And it is very fragmented, very difficult to build all these custom integrations with different shops, very difficult, very expensive.”
For example, the average dealership depends on more than 40 different software systems, including dealer management systems and customer relationship management tools to digital retailing, service, inventory and payment processing platforms.
Milne compared it to the financial services industry 20 years ago. Fintech company plaid, which connects bank accounts with financial applications, helped stop that communication difference. Milne also wants to do the same, but for automotive retail.
Milne is now the founder and CEO of a new startup, called Autonify, who has created an API to allow dealerships and service shops to communicate in real time with manufacturers and software vendors that strengthen their operations.
Autouniffy has been working quietly for nine months and Santa Monica is located in California. After piloting with several customers in 2024, Autouniffy is now opening its sales for the industry.
There is the latest startup to come out of a multi-year partnership between autounify up.labs and porsche. The startup has raised $ 5 million in a round under the leadership of UP. They will help the fund startup scale their workforce from nine which today works up to 20 by the end of the year.
“In fact, for the rest of the year meditation is creating technology and building a sales pipeline,” he said.
Up.labs is not an enterprise firm, even though it emerges, and operates in parallel, up.partners. It is also not a corporate accelerator or an incubator. Company, which launched during Up.summit 2022 In Bentonville, Arkansas is structured as an enterprise laboratory with a new type of financial investment vehicle.
UP.LABS participates with major corporations – Porsche was the first – and then works to identify the biggest problems of the industry and make a startup with business models that will solve those pain points. In an unusual turn, these startups do not serve the company only, in this case, Porsche. To succeed, they must be able to serve a broad market.
UP.LABS has also closed similar deals with Alaska Airlines and JB Hunt.
John Koolt, CEO of UP.LABS, said he has highlighted some of the biggest challenges of the motor vehicle industry while working with Porsche. To date, companies have launched four startups, including the bridge system, a software-e-servis platform that provides performance management software to EV suppliers, manufacturers and operators and sensigo, which created an AI platform that allows service technicians to quickly diagnose problems in modern, software-related vehicles.
According to the coolt, autonift is its fourth startup, and one that is the most important and most difficult to solve.
He said, “This is the exact success for which we build: a company that not only deal with a technical challenge, but fundamentally explains how an entire industry operates,” he said.
