Up.labs-Porsche, the latest emerging

With the establishment of the serial entrepreneur Joel Millen, then evaluated, then sold by selling successful mobile car repair service to Autonation, he was suffering from a continuous problem.

The retail auto industry has a communication problem. It is expensive. Thousands of agents and mechanical shops – each of them with a group of software systems – lacks a common language to make communication with manufacturers and other companies easier.

He said: “We have faced this problem, how do you work with agents and shops and talk to them as you wander in repairing cars and trying to refer them from business or get spare parts from them?” “It is very fragmented, very difficult, very expensive to build all this integration with different stores.”

For example, the average agents depend on more than 40 different software systems, starting with agent management systems and customer relationship management tools to digital retail platforms, service, stock and payment processing.

Millen compared it to the financial services industry 20 years ago. Fintech Company EngravedThat connect bank accounts to financial applications, helped bridge this communication gap. Millen wants to do the same, but to retail cars.

Millen is now a founder and executive of a new start -up company called autonify that designed an applications interface to allow agents and service stores to communicate in actual time with manufacturers and software sellers that operate their operations.

Autounify works quietly for nine months based in Santa Monica, California. After experimenting with many customers in 2024, Autounify now opens its sales to industry.

Autounfy is the latest startup from among a multi -year partnership between Up.labs and Porsche. The startup also raised $ 5 million in a tour led by UP.Partners. This funds will help on the startup scale of its nine -year -old operating scale today to about 20 by the end of the year.

He said: “The focus on the rest of the year is to build technology and build a sales pipeline.”

Up.labs is not an adventure company, although it has appeared from, works in parallel with, Up.partners. It is not speeding for companies or an incubator either. The company that was launched through Up.summit 2022 In Benonville, Arkansas, it was organized as a project laboratory with a new type of financial investment vehicle.

Up.labs hit partnerships with major companies – was the first Porsche – then works to determine the biggest problems in this field and create startups with business models that will solve these pain points. In an unusual development, these startups simply do not serve the company, in this case, Porsche. To be successful, they should be able to serve the wider market.

Up.labs has also been imprisoned in similar deals With Alaska Airlines And JB Hunt.

John Coult, CEO of Up.labs, said they have discovered some of the largest challenges in the auto industry while working with Porsche. To date, companies have launched four startups, including Systems withdrawThe software platform as a service provides performance management programs for suppliers, manufacturers, operators, and Sensigo, which has created the Amnesty International platform that allows service technicians to diagnose problems quickly in modern vehicles, knowledgeable of programs.

Autounify is its fourth start, and it is one of the most important and difficult issues, according to Coult.

He said: “It is exactly the type of penetration that we build for: a company that does not only address the technical challenge, but also restores how to make an entire industry.”