While the serial entrepreneur Joel Milne founded, reduced and therefore successfully sold the repair of repairs for the self -repairs, was afflicted by a persistent problem.
The automotive retail sector has a communication problem. And it is expensive. Thousands of dealers and mechanics shops – each with a series of software systems – lack common language to facilitate communication with producers and other companies.
“We had this problem of” how do you work with dealers and shops and talk to them as you run around to repair the cars and try to direct business or get parts of them? “”, He said. “And it is very fragmented, very difficult, very expensive to build all these personalized additions with the different shops.”
For example, the average dealership is based on more than 40 different software systems, ranging from retailers management systems and relationship management tools with customers to digital retail, service, inventory and processing of payments.
Milne compared it with the financial services sector 20 years ago. Fintech Company Plaid, which connects bank accounts to financial applications, has contributed to filling that communication gap. Milne wants to do the same, but for the sale of car detail.
Milne is now founding and CEO of a new startup called AutoUnify who built an API to allow dealers and service stores to communicate in real time with the manufacturers and software providers who feed their operations.
Autounify works silently for nine months and is based in Santa Monica, California. After piloting more customers in 2024, Autounify is now opening his sales to the sector.
Autounify is the last startup that came out of a multi -year partnership between Up.Labs and Porsche. The startup also collected $ 5 million in a round guided by Up.Partners. These funds will help the startup to downsize its workforce from the nine which it takes today at about 20 by the end of the year.
“The goal for the rest of the year is the construction of the technology and the construction of the sales pipeline,” he said.
Up.Labs is not a business company, even if it has emerged and operated in parallel with, up.partners. It is not even a corporate accelerator or an incubator. The company, launched during Up.Summit 2022 in Bentonville, in Arkansas, is structured as a risk laboratory with a new type of financial investment vehicle.
Up.Labs Strikes partnerships with the main companies – Porsche was the first – and then works to identify the major problems of the sector and create startups with business models that will solve those weak points. In an unusual turning point, these startups are not simply needed the company, in this case, Porsche. To be successful, they must be able to serve the largest market.
Up.Labs also closed to similar agreements with Alaska Airlines and JB Hunt.
The CEO of Up.Labs John Kuolt said he discovered some of the major challenges of the car industry while working with Porsche. To date, the companies have launched four startups, including Pull Systems, a software-as-warriovice platform that provides performance management software to suppliers, producers and EV operators, and Sensigo, which has created an artificial intelligence platform that allows service technicians to quickly diagnose the problems in modern vehicles and defined by software.
Autounify is his fourth startup, which stands out as one of the most critical and most difficult to solve, according to Kuolt.
“It is exactly the type of turning point for which we build: a company that not only faces a technical challenge, but substantially reshapes an entire sector as a work,” he said.
