PartsTech Raises $35M Series C: A Letter from the CEO

Today, the PartsTech team is celebrating some news that is earning all of the emoji reactions on our company-wide Slack channel! 

🎉 PartsTech has raised a Series C funding round!

Here are the facts:

💰Funding amount — $35 million in Series C capital

🤝 Round led by — OpenView, a renowned venture capital firm known for its deep expertise in scaling high-growth technology companies.

🥜 PartsTech in a nutshell – If you’re new to the PartsTech name, we are a B2B marketplace that aggregates 30,000 auto parts and tire supplier locations — representing 5,000+ brands — into one cloud-based e-commerce platform. Auto repair shops that have shifted to PartsTech for parts procurement have access to nearly 12 million parts that can be found and ordered in just a few clicks. By eliminating the need for physical parts catalogs and significantly reducing time on the phone with suppliers, PartsTech users are saving an average of 10 minutes per repair order. 

See press release. 

Reflection on the Past — My Frustrations When I Owned a Shop 

After starting a shop with close friends at a very young age, I felt deep aggravation over the parts procurement and ordering processes. I could turn and look around at the ways I could consume every other good and service on the planet, and the processes were drenched in the ease of what modern technology could provide. 

I could order a pizza in less than 30 seconds from my phone and track its status with accuracy. Yet here I was, watching my shop’s profits take a hit over and over again due to issues related to the outdated processes of ordering auto parts. 

A large majority of my team’s time was sucked into identifying, locating, and ordering the right parts — they spent hours each week on the phone with suppliers. We made dozens of repeat phone calls every day trying to get the right parts, but over and over again, we would receive the wrong parts. Our parts return rate was high, and the worst part about receiving the wrong components was that it would delay repairs and leave lifts tied up.

Repair delays not only impacted our bottom line, but they deeply frustrated our customers. When customers were putting their trust in our shop, it was our desire to service their vehicles with high-quality parts and the best service to get them back on the road as quickly as possible. The parts procurement headache was a bottleneck to our ability to do this. 

I knew that my experience couldn’t be unique and that other shops were feeling the pains of the parts procurement process. Before my time at the shop, I worked as a teenager in the parts department at a large dealership. With every phone call from repair shops, I could hear the frustration and urgency in their voices — all they wanted was the right part as fast as possible.  

In 2011, I decided the industry needed a better way to find and order parts — this was the beginning of PartsTech. 

I spent 18 months researching what the industry needed. I interviewed hundreds of repair shops, distributors, and manufacturers around the country. As I suspected, there was a shared feeling of frustration across all parties. The shops were frustrated with hours spent on the phone, the use of five disparate online systems, and the frequency with which they received the wrong parts. The distributors were frustrated by the high number of calls they were fielding from shops asking for price and availability quotes. They also felt pain from the uniquely high return rates. The manufacturers were frustrated that they couldn’t get their updated catalogs to customers faster. 

The solution the industry needed was one that not only served and benefited repair shops but also the entire parts supply chain ecosystem. 

In 2013, I partnered with Olexy Sadovy, (now PartsTech’s Chief Technology Officer) to build the first lines of code for the PartsTech catalog solution. 

By 2014, my good friend Erik St. Pierre (now PartsTech’s Chief Operating Officer), who had been helping me work on PartsTech, sacrificing nights and weekends, took the leap to come on full-time. With some early funding, we worked to bring on the distributors and a loyal base of shops who believed in our mission. 

Today, PartsTech is used by over 15,000 repair shops. It’s incredible for me to stand here and look back at the history of PartsTech and the adventure we’ve been on to get to where we are today. I could not be more proud of the PartsTech team and the ways they pour themselves into our product and service our customers. 

Thank You to Our Customers and Partners for Helping Us Build Our Vast Parts Procurement Ecosystem 

The entire PartsTech team focuses on being customer-first while bringing value to the parts procurement supply chain. Customers are saving time and money that they can reinvest back into their business. Supplier partners see fewer part returns from PartsTech users. Manufacturer partners are gaining rich product purchasing info right down to the point of sale. 

I am so grateful to the entire PartsTech team for what we have built, and my appreciation does not end with them.

None of this could have happened without loyal customers and partners willing to collaborate to close the gap between repair shops and suppliers. 

Thank you to each and every customer for trusting PartsTech for your parts procurement and ordering needs. To those who have been with us since our early days, thank you for sticking with us and for sharing your candid feedback and suggestions that have helped us build the product and network that we have today. Keep the feedback coming! 

To every PartsTech supplier and manufacturer, we are grateful for the ways in which you have partnered with us to build this robust auto parts marketplace. From the integration work to the sharing of your data catalogs, your continued partnership is a core piece to creating an easy way for auto shops to get the right parts, save time, and grow their businesses.

And to our shop management partners, we admire how you are driving innovations for the automotive industry to help shops modernize from end-to-end to work faster while serving their customers better. Thank you for trusting PartsTech as a core integration in your solution offerings. 

Where PartsTech is Headed 

With this round of funding, we plan to scale our platform, data infrastructure, and team to bring more innovations into PartsTech as we work to become a total parts procurement solution. We will continue to bring the right technology and partners into PartsTech to give auto repair businesses a single place to find aftermarket parts, tires, and original equipment (OE) parts. 

Be on the lookout for announcements about new features and solutions that will further ease and speed up the ways in which your shop can source and order parts and tires. 

Thank you for being on this journey with us. 

– Greg Kirber, CEO, PartsTech