As serial entrepreneur Joel Milne founded, scaled, and then successfully sold mobile auto repair service startup RepairSmith to AutoNation, he was plagued by a persistent problem.
The automotive retail industry has a communication problem. And it’s an expensive one. Thousands of dealerships and mechanic shops — each one with an array of software systems — lack a common language to make communication with manufacturers and other businesses easier.
“We had this problem of, ‘how do you work with dealerships and shops and talk to them as you’re running around repairing cars and trying to refer them business or get parts from them?’” he said. “And it’s very fragmented, very difficult, very costly to build all these custom integrations with the different stores.”
For instance, the average dealership relies on more than 40 different software systems, ranging from 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 to financial applications, helped close that communication gap. Milne wants to do the same, but for automotive retail.
Milne is now founder and CEO of a new startup called AutoUnify that has built an API to allow dealerships and service shops to communicate in real time with the manufacturers and software vendors that power their operations.
AutoUnify has been operating quietly for nine months and is based in Santa Monica, California. After piloting with multiple customers in 2024, AutoUnify is now opening its sales to the industry.
AutoUnify is the latest startup to come out of a multi-year partnership between UP.Labs and Porsche. The startup has also raised $5 million in a round led by UP.Partners. Those funds will help the startup scale its workforce from the nine it employs today to about 20 by the end of the year. “Really the focus for the rest of the year is building the technology and building the sales pipeline,” he said.
UP.Labs is not a venture firm, even though it emerged from, and operates in parallel with, UP.Partners. It’s not a corporate accelerator or incubator either. The company, which launched during UP.Summit 2022 in Bentonville, Arkansas, is structured as a venture lab with a new kind of financial investment vehicle.
Up.Labs strikes partnerships with major corporations — Porsche was the first — and then works to identify the industry’s biggest problems and create startups with business models that will solve those pain points. In an unusual twist, these startups don’t simply serve the company, in this case, Porsche. To be successful, they have to be able to serve the broader market.
Up.Labs has also locked in similar deals with Alaska Airlines and JB Hunt.
Up.Labs CEO John Kuolt said they’ve uncovered some of the automotive industry’s biggest challenges while working with Porsche. To date, the companies have launched four startups, including Pull Systems, a software-as-as-service 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-defined vehicles.
AutoUnify is its fourth startup, and one that stands out as one of the most critical and most difficult issues to solve, according to Kuolt.
“It’s exactly the kind of breakthrough we build for: a company that not only tackles a technical challenge, but fundamentally reshapes how an entire industry operates,” he said.