Vehicle repair van operated by mobile vehicle service company NuBrakes.
As further evidence there's money to be made by making auto repairs more convenient and less expensive, Austin, Texas-based NuBrakes said Wednesday it scored $9 million in Series A funding from a varied group of investors.
The company provides a variety of mobile vehicle repairs to consumers and fleets wherever the car or truck happens to be in nine markets in Texas, Georgia, Tennessee and Florida. That ninth market, Knoxville, Tenn., was announced today as well and NuBrakes expects to have a national footprint in the U.S. by the end of 2022, founder and CEO Walker Drewett told Forbes.com.
Indeed, this new cash infusion led by Canvas Ventures, with participation from existing investors including Contrary Capital, Bling Capital and Automotive Ventures will help power an overall expansion for the two-year old company.
Walker Drewett, founder and CEO, NuBrakes.
“We're going to hire more than 100 people using the funds, particularly investing heavily in our leadership team and our product and engineering teams and expand to new areas,” said Drewett in an interview.
NuBrakes repair services for consumers center mainly on brakes and oil changes, but expanding, according to Drewett. The menu for fleets broadens to servicing suspensions, alternator and battery replacements and the company is looking at adding replacement tires.
While the notion of at-home service saw a major boost due to the overall move to doing business remotely brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic, Drewett says the need became especially acute for commercial fleets noting, “we absolutely saw an increase from fleet operators just as a byproduct of surge in demand of e-commerce delivery home services.”
Aside from the convenience of not having to bring a vehicle to a dealership or garage, Drewett says the cost for NuBrakes service is “up to 30% more affordable than the brick and mortar shop.”
NuBrakes service technician repairing a vehicle at its location.
Through its “predictive telematics platform,” with owner permission, NuBrakes is able to capture vehicle data to conduct diagnostics, offer service suggestions and warnings and book appointments.
While many businesses and industries are finding it difficult to attract new employees, Drewett is confident NuBrakes will have no trouble trying to hire those 100 new workers since, he said, the company offers “competitive wages, stock options, fully loaded benefits, giving them a better offering than they can find in the market at large. We're having a lot of success bringing on high-talent individuals.”
That's a key reason Canvas Ventures decided to invest in NuBrakes according to general partner Mike Ghaffary.
“I’m especially excited to work with Walker and the entire NuBrakes team because they are directly contributing to the revitalization and stability of middle class job opportunities—a trend we’re passionate about here at Canvas,” Ghaffary said in a statement.
This all represents major progress for a company that grew out of a student car wash business. As Drewitt recalls back in 2016 he and a group of fellow University of Texas students decided to start a mobile car wash service and named it NuWash.
With a $5,000 bankroll, the young team themselves washed 4,500 cars. “Effectively we were the first independent contractors on the NuWash platform,” joked Drewett.
Within two years or so the business took off taking in “seven figures in annualized income” according to Drewett and expanded into the Dallas market.
But something was missing.
“We realized while our customers loved getting a clean car we weren't necessarily solving their biggest car car issues,” Drewett recalled. “A car wash is like taking a vitamin. Our customers had much more chronic pains they needed to solve.”
In May of 2019 NuWash morphed into NuBrakes in a move to solve motorists' “chronic pains” from the convenience of their location efficiently and less expensively.
So far it's paying off. With this new round of funding NuBrakes has attracted investments totaling $12 million as it seeks to take its mobile repair model national and save customers enough time and money, perhaps to take their vehicles in for a premium car wash.
