New Zealand-based, AutoParts startup Partly picks £18 million, expands to UK

New Zealand-based Partly has raised £18M to make buying car parts easier.

The supply of car parts is constrained by the unique requirements of customers for parts to match their vehicles, to ease these restrictions, Partly will connect parts, buyers, all over the world with the appropriate parts.

One of the biggest and busiest venture capital firms in Europe, Octopus Ventures, led the round, including Square Peg, Blackbird, Shasta Ventures, Ten13, Square Co-Founder Randy Redigg, Hillfarrance, Icehouse, and I2BF.

With the creation of a London office and the hiring of its first sales support workers, Partly also entered the UK last month. By hiring key positions in the UK and Europe and tripling its personnel over the next 12 months, partially will use the investment to support worldwide growth. This includes assembling a potent sales and marketing team.

Levi Fawcett, a part-time CEO, and former Rocket Lab engineer claims: “This is a tremendously challenging technical issue that nobody has solved. To manage millions of changes every minute from thousands of data sources, we leverage cutting-edge technologies like Rust, Kafka, and ScyllaDB. The early founding team we have formed is crucial to our company’s success thus far. We have a sizable backlog of customers and are giving priority to important clients, particularly in Europe.

“We’re seeking the world’s best software engineers who are passionate about finding solutions to challenging issues. The bar is quite high because we only hire about 1% of applicants, despite having a truly great workforce in Australasia and Europe.

Partly, a platform for connecting manufacturers and buyers of parts was founded in 2020 by Nathan Taylor, Evan Jia, Levi Fawcett, Mark Song, and Tony Austin. It helps buyers access the billions of parts that are now offline. Out of the more than 85B vehicle components in the globe, only a small portion can be easily located or viewed online. This problem is only partially solved. The market for automobile parts worldwide is worth $1.9T annually.

Investor at Octopus Ventures Matt Chandler stated: “Partly is tackling a particularly challenging big-data challenge, leading to much better consumer outcomes. The crew has gained extensive engineering expertise since the company’s founding from places like Amazon, eBay, and Rocket Lab. We are overjoyed by the impact this company is already having on the global automobile sector by enhancing the overall value chain as well as the consumer experience.

According to CSO and former GM of Amazon Tony Austin, “Millions of car component buyers suffer needlessly every day attempting to identify and buy the correct parts for the job they are trying to complete. Partly’s revolutionary tech platform and focus on the consumer let our customers create and manage digital commerce experiences that make ordering the appropriate part as simple as ordering an Uber trip. We look forward to 2023 and the next phase of our progress.

With over $150M in annual orders and over $4B in indirect sales, the company collaborates with several Fortune 500 organizations, representing the most extensive retail marketplaces, automakers, and component manufacturers in the world.

Image Credit: Partly