🔒UConn grads’ e-commerce business aims to become Expedia of auto-parts purchasing

An e-commerce tech company formed by two former UConn grads and with a major presence in West Hartford is trying to upend, and make easier, the way repair shops and car dealerships buy and find auto parts.

Simply put, PartsTech — led by co-founders Greg Kirber and Erik St. Pierre — is trying to become the Kayak.com and Expedia of auto-parts purchasing.

The company, founded about a decade ago, has developed an e-commerce platform that allows commercial customers to buy millions of different auto parts from a network of about 30,000 local and national suppliers. (The company does not offer services to individual retail consumers.)

Its first big client — landed in 2013 — was AutoZone. It now has 7,000 repair shops that use its cloud-based service, which allows customers to search for specific brake pads, alternators, batteries, and numerous other parts simply by entering a vehicle’s identification and vin number.

“It’s a total procurement platform,” said Kirber, the company’s 36-year-old CEO. “We bring together a network of various sellers ranging from national distributors like Napa Auto Parts or AutoZone down to a single-location parts store, whether a large parts store or a mom and pop.”

PartsTech has grown significantly over the years. It now has 90 full- and part-time employees and contractors, including 11 based in a West Hartford office in Blue Back Square. St. Pierre — 38, and the chief operating officer — is based in West Hartford, along with other support and account executives.

Kirber is based in the company’s Cambridge, Massachusetts office.

Both are bullish about their future growth opportunities and said the company could reach profitability within a year. Startup information website Crunchbase reported the company has raised $16.5 million since its inception.

It earns revenue by taking a cut of each parts sale from the distributor. The company declined to disclose its annual revenues.

Repetitive process 

Kirber said he saw a need for PartsTech when he worked at a Mercedes Benz dealership during high school and college. He said he witnessed the nonsensical way auto repair shops and car dealerships ordered, purchased and received car parts.

“Every day was hours on the telephone getting prices for parts,” Kirber recalled. “There were multiple calls a day and it was a very repetitive process. The wrong parts were showing up and there were many mistakes being made. The industry, as a whole, was looking at $3 billion in losses due to product returns. There had to be a better way.”

Kirber and St. Pierre met at UConn, where they both earned an MBA and law degree. They developed a friendship and eventually came up with the concept to launch PartsTech, pitching the idea a little more than 10 years ago to Richard Dino, then an entrepreneurship professor at UConn’s School of Business.

“What they proposed intrigued me,” Dino said in a recent interview. “What they wanted to do and were proposing was not just innovative, it would change the way the industry operates. Their database today pretty much encompasses every part that’s ever been made for any car.”

Kirber and St. Pierre have received outside capital from business plan competitions and the Connecticut Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. PartsTech also has seven investors, including “a major investor who came on board in August 2014” that allowed the company to get off the ground, Kirber said.

Kirber declined to disclose any investors, but PartsTech has had success raising capital in recent years. In two separate U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission filings since 2018, the company said it raised about $13.5 million.

St. Pierre said the company is in “growth mode” but is not currently raising capital. That could change next year, depending on market conditions.

Kirber said key to the company’s growth has been building an extensive auto-parts database. PartsTech recently added tires to the offerings.

“We have partnerships with thousands of manufacturers from all over the globe who are feeding us information on their products, images, schematics,” Kirber said. “We call it our parts catalog; it’s a massive database of all the parts that are manufactured within the industry. It allows repair shops to see everything from the quantity of the parts to the brands available and the pricing and delivery times.”

Growth ahead

Kirber and St. Pierre said they plan to grow the company with more employees and possibly new locations.

Kirber said he hopes to double the number of employees in West Hartford over the next year. PartsTech’s C-suite is spread among offices in Cambridge, West Hartford and Arizona.

St. Pierre said the company is not tied to any one physical location, and established a remote leadership model before the concept became popularized during the pandemic.

“It’s about finding the best talent in the country,” he said. “We are remote and have always worked this way and that leadership model is fantastic and works well.”

In addition to its U.S. footprint, PartsTech is also branching out globally, Kirber said. It has a presence in parts of Europe, as well as Canada and Mexico.

“We do have some development overseas and it’s growing,” Kirber said. “We’ve got teams that are building some analogous products down in Mexico and we are growing almost organically up in Canada.”

St. Pierre said the co-founders have no immediate plans to sell the business, even though “we get a lot of interest from outside companies.”

Dino, the former UConn professor, said he’s not surprised that the startup founded by Kirber and St. Pierre has taken off.

“They both worked really, really hard and ate Ramen noodles for a long time,” Dino said. “It takes a lot of ambition, dedication and a willingness to never give up if you want to build a business. It’s not just about identifying a market need, but they came up with an innovative solution and executed it in a big, big way.”