ReparSmith, a company launched in 2019 aims at making the car repair process much easier than it is by having the mechanic delivered to the driver’s home. The startup currently functions only in 7 American states, with their new round of funding at $42 million, the aim is to scale their operations and take their services to every major metropolitan area in the United States by the end of 2022.
RepairSmith CEO Joel Milne said “Fundamentally what we’re doing here is e-commerce plus logistics. We’re trying to disrupt probably the biggest retail industry that’s untouched by tech.” All RepairSmith needs is a booking or an appointment through their app/website and the mechanic will come to repair your vehicle at your doorstep and work in your driveway.
RepaiSmith was born in the Mercedez-Benz incubator program and the automaker helped fund the first few rounds for the startup. As they have already broken ground in a few cities and have numbers to show that it is a viable business, the company was able to bring on new investors from TI Capital, Porsche Ventures and Spring Mountain Capital as part of their Series B round of financing.
Joel Milne, CEO RepairSmith said that “We built this business from the beginning to be multi-brand as an industry solution. While [Mercedes] seeded it, it was never meant to be a Mercedes solution. That was always the intent.”
According to Joel, most of the appointments booked can be attended to by a mechanic within one to two days depending on the market and the neighbourhood the booking has come in from and 90% of the issues can be repaired or fixed on-site by the mechanic working on your vehicle, in your driveway. RepairSmith has also partnered with many auto repair shops across states, so for the remaining 10% who can have the problem fixed in their driveway, they can drive to or get their vehicle towed to any of those auto repair solutions and have the issue fixed.
Sometimes, the customer is already aware of the issue they are facing with their vehicle. However, if you are not aware of the problem you are facing, RepairSmith schedules an inspection visit which then helps them generate a quote for their services after.
All RepairSmith technicians are employees of the company and not individual contractors working with the company. The only reason for this move was to be able to attract and retain top talent in order to provide the best possible solution for this new method of auto repairs.
“We didn’t feel that we could be competitive in recruiting the quality of technicians we were looking for, not giving them standard employment terms. All technicians at repair shops are employees today, and that’s the market that we compete in for labour” He also added that it helps avoid any legal issues the company would've encountered over what qualifies as a contractor versus an employee.
In order to make an expansion to all the major metropolitan areas, the startup needs to not only hire more technicians but also improve upon the existing software and figure out the logistics platform which will be built from the ground up.
Joel Milne said that, “Ultimately, if the market is good, we’ll be looking for further investment to grow, whether it’s internationally, whether it’s to grow our service offering. But this raise gets us a long way on the way there, depending on how fast we want to go.”
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