He was plagued by permanent problems when serial entrepreneur Joel Milne founded, expanded and mobile auto repair service startup repairs were sold to automation.
The automotive retail industry has communication issues. And it’s expensive. Thousands of dealers and mechanic shops (each with an array of software systems) lack a common language to facilitate communication with manufacturers and other businesses.
“We had the question: ‘How do you work with dealers and shops to fix your car and show us your business, how do you work with the dealer and talk with them when you’re trying to get parts from them?” “And it’s very fragmented, very difficult and it’s very costly to build all these custom integrations with different stores.”
For example, the average dealer relies on over 40 different software systems, ranging from dealer management systems and customer relationship management tools to digital retail, services, inventory, and payment processing platforms.
Milne compared it to the financial services industry 20 years ago. FinTech Company Plaid, which connects your bank account to your financial application, helped fill that communication gap. Milne wants the same thing, but for car retail.
Milne is now the founder and CEO of a new startup called Autonify, and is building APIs to enable dealers and service shops to communicate in real time with manufacturers and software vendors that are bolstering their business.
Autounify has been running quietly for nine months and is based in Santa Monica, California. After piloting with multiple customers in 2024, Autonify is now selling to the industry.
Autounify is the latest startup born from a multi-year partnership between UP.Labs and Porsche. The startup also raised $5 million in a round led by UP.PARTNERS. These funds will help expand the startup workforce to around 20 by the end of the year, starting with nine recruitments today.
“The focus for the rest of the year is to build technology and build a sales pipeline,” he said.
up.labs is not a venture company. It’s not a corporate accelerator or an incubator. Launched at summit 2022 in Bentonville, Arkansas, the company is comprised of a venture lab with a new kind of financial investment vehicle.
up.labs strikes partnerships with big companies – Porsche was the first – and works to create startups with a business model that identifies the biggest issues in the industry and solves those issues. With an extraordinary twist, these startups don’t simply serve the company. In this case it’s a Porsche. To succeed, you need to be able to serve a wider market.
up.labs also locks in similar deals with Alaska Airlines and JB Hunt.
John Kuolt, CEO of up.labs, said he discovered some of the biggest challenges in the automotive industry while working with Porsche. To date, companies have launched four startups, including a software platform as a service that provides performance management software to EV suppliers, manufacturers, operators and Sensigo, and a software platform as a service that creates AI platforms that allow service technicians to quickly diagnose the latest software-defined vehicle problems.
According to Kuolt, Autounify is the fourth startup and stands out as one of the most important and most difficult questions.
“It’s exactly the kind of breakthrough we build. It’s a company that not only tackles technical challenges, but also fundamentally reshaping how the entire industry operates,” he said.