I’m excited to announce another investment out of the Automotive Ventures DealerFund.
It’s amazing to think that it’s been 13 years since I had the opportunity to oversee AutoTrader.com’s acquisition of vAuto.
Boy, how does time fly.
At that time, vAuto was just getting initial traction, and I had the honor to spend a ton of time with vAuto founder Dale Pollak, who helped educate me both on the importance of used vehicle inventory management, but also schooled me on how he was architecting an incredible company: focusing on generating demand through his industry thought leadership, coupled with a maniacal focus on customer success, and surrounding himself with an A+ team of operational executives.
Since that time, I’ve had the chance to dig into dealership expense structures and found it amazing that the average franchise store spends about $30k per month on software products. The largest of these are their DMS spend, but not too far behind are the CRM, the dealer website and a dealer’s inventory management tool.
Stocking the correct inventory is the lifeblood of a dealership. Ensuring that you don’t overpay for that inventory, and can make dynamic price changes as local supply and demand changes in your market, can literally mean the difference between the top and bottom performers in a market.
Stocking the correct inventory is the lifeblood of a dealership. Ensuring that you don’t overpay for that inventory, and can make dynamic price changes as local supply and demand changes in your market, can literally mean the difference between the top and bottom performers in a market.
I mention all of this as a precursor to the announcement of the latest investment out of our new DealerFund.
This week it was announced that Automotive Ventures invested in VINCUE’s Series B financing round, alongside Holman Growth Ventures and AutoTech Ventures.
We’re very honored to have a chance to invest in this amazing, Kansas City-based company.
VINCUE is a revolutionary end-to-end inventory lifecycle solution for retail automotive dealerships.
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 VINCUE’s 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 – ultimately allowing them to outperform the market.
VINCUE provides the data intelligence and tools necessary to make impactful decisions, measure success, and ultimately, outperform the rest of the market in real-time.
We created the Automotive Ventures DealerFund to enable car dealers to invest in technology solutions that help improve their operations.
I honestly can’t think of a better company for the new fund than VINCUE, which will deliver a dramatic impact on both driving incremental revenue for dealers, while also finding and realizing efficiencies in their cost structures.
As you can tell, I’m simultaneously both honored and extremely excited to be an investor in VINCUE.
You can check out the company at www.VINCUE.com.
