KANSAS CITY, MO (August 15, 2023) – DealerCue Automotive Corp. (“VINCUE”), maker of VINCUE, the revolutionary end-to-end inventory lifecycle solution for retail automotive dealerships, today announced the completion of its Series B investment round led by Holman, a global automotive services organization, and followed by Autotech Ventures (“Autotech”) and Automotive Ventures, a pair of venture capital firms with portfolios spanning automotive, transportation, and technology. The investments are the first major institutional investments for VINCUE and enables the company to scale operations, advance its product roadmap, and meet increasing market demand.
“Holman is a remarkable organization with an unsurpassed collection of automotive competencies and is held in extremely high regard across the entire industry. We’re thrilled Holman believes in the significant potential of our technology and is at the forefront of this investment in our company,” said Chris Hoke, Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Chief Technology Officer of VINCUE. “Holman is an innovator in our industry and the organization’s forward-thinking mindset along with its strategic capital investment will help to fuel our company’s continued growth.”
Holman delivers a unique range of automotive-centric services and operates one of the largest privately owned dealership groups in the United States with more than 30 franchise dealerships across eight states from coast-to-coast. Danny Zaslavsky, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of VINCUE says that the collaboration started as a simple customer/vendor relationship, but both companies realized there were a number of natural synergies. “As Holman piloted our platform in several of their dealership locations, it quickly became apparent that our technology would help them further optimize operations while also enhancing our own capabilities,” said Zaslavsky, “we’re proud that Holman shares our vision for the future of automotive retailing and we’re honored they’ve invested in our innovative inventory management solution.”
Through its unified platform, VINCUE offers a comprehensive suite of solutions and capabilities to manage every step of the inventory lifecycle including buying plans, multi-channel acquisition sourcing, market pricing and appraisal, merchandising and syndication, and digital marketing. The goal of a unified platform is to help dealers unlock prevailing strategies that increase gross and turn through providing real-time market and competitor data to make better buying and merchandising decisions – and outperform the market.
“The mission of our growth ventures team is to align with early-stage businesses who are driving innovation in the industry and complement Holman’s collective automotive competencies. VINCUE certainly fits that profile and we’re excited to invest in their next phase of growth,” said Bill Cariss, President and CEO, Growth Ventures, Holman. “The VINCUE team is extremely talented and continues to think differently about inventory lifecycle management. Their intuitive platform is poised to disrupt the status quo of the retail automotive sector and offers dealerships a solution that empowers insightful decision making.”
As part of its investment in VINCUE, Holman is also poised to integrate the technology at additional locations across its family of dealerships. By leveraging VINCUE’s platform, Holman is able to further enhance its market intelligence to introduce new operational processes and procedures that it hopes will set the standard for the future of automotive retailing. “Through our initial use of VINCUE’s technology, we believe it provides the data intelligence and tools necessary to make impactful decisions, measure success, and ultimately, outperform the rest of the market in real-time,” says Chris Morgan, Vice President, Retail Operations, Holman.
Following Holman, both Autotech and Automotive Ventures will also be providing capital as part of the Series B investment. Autotech Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm with more than $500M under management and a mission to solve the world’s ground transport challenges with technology. Its investment team includes: Quin Garcia, Managing Director; Alexei Andreev, Managing Director; Maurice Gunderson, Managing Director Emeritus; Burak Cendek, Partner; Daniel Hoffer, Venture Partner; Tony Rimas, Venture Partner; and Esat Canli, Analyst.
“Automotive as a whole has largely been left out of the digital transformation happening in other retail industries, often relying on lagging indicators for buying and selling decisions from legacy software tools built decades ago.” said Rimas. “VINCUE offers modern solutions built on real-time data and intelligence to help dealers outperform the market instead of race to the bottom of it.”
Led by Steve Greenfield, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Automotive Ventures promotes itself as funding the next wave of innovation in transportation technology. Its leadership team includes: Justin Charbonneau, Venture Principal; Andrew Gordon, Head of Value Creation; Adam Lafferty, VP of Operations; Brian Reed, Operating Partner; and industry veteran Chip Perry, Operating Partner. “VINCUE fits our mission perfectly,” says Greenfield, “they are looking into the future of technology and automotive and building solutions for today and beyond.” Greenfield says their decision to invest was as much about product as it was about the vision. “We know the industry and the market is changing, VINCUE is doing something about it,” he said.
“We have a team here in Kansas City that truly believes in our vision, our mission, and most importantly the success of the entire dealer body,” said Hoke. “To have these institutions, true industry leaders, share our vision and put their belief in us is humbling.” Hoke says that VINCUE’s top priorities are now growing its Performance Management and Development teams, and investing in operational improvements that will allow them to get more done, faster. “We have the benefit now of dealerships seeking us out in the industry, wanting to understand how we can help them win,” he said, “so right now it’s about how we scale, grow, and meet their expectations.”
ABOUT VINCUE
VINCUE is transforming the retail automotive software industry by providing dealers with new, innovative end-to-end inventory lifecycle management and market pricing solutions. This gives dealers access to real-time data and tools in a single system to stock smarter, increase turn, compete effectively, and above all else — maximize profits.
Original press release available here: https://vincue.com/blog/vincue-secures-series-b-funding/
