Fullbay, a business management software provider for the heavy-duty truck (HDT) repair industry, announced today that it has raised $23 million as growth investment from Mainsail Partners, a San Francisco-based growth equity firm. The Arizona-based startup’s platform allows HDT maintenance shops to create instant invoices, optimize workflows, attract technicians and improve customer service levels.
Jacob Findlay, the CEO and founder of Fullbay, described the company as a “medical record for trucks.” Before founding Fullbay, Findlay had worked for a year in an HDT shop, where he witnessed the struggles repair shops go through in regard to operational inefficiencies and holding on to their clients. Findlay realized that the market had a dearth of purpose-built software-as-a-solution (SaaS) products that could automate certain operations.
“We talked to dozens of shop-owners who were buried in paperwork and frustrated by the organizational complexities that kept them from doing what they love – turning wrenches and being able to leave the work behind at the end of each day. Since commercializing Fullbay in 2015, we believe we’ve addressed all of these pain points,” said Findlay.
Over the years, the company has built out a robust suite of applications that serve a wide range of needs within an HDT shop. “In the shop itself, Fullbay supports technicians and parts managers by estimating service costs, automating inventory and ordering parts. In the back office, Fullbay provides templatized invoices that integrate directly with QuickBooks, allowing accounting offices to become better organized and more efficient,” said the company in its statement.
Findlay explained that the company has recently integrated payments, which allows a technician on the side of the road to swipe a credit card on the spot within the Fullbay mobile application. “We negotiated directly with the payment processor so not only can they fully accept credit card transactions in the app, they can do it at a rate that’s lower than a shop could negotiate on its own,” he said.
Fullbay plans to channel the newly raised investment in product development – making the app more comfortable to use and comprehensively solving persistent issues that HDT maintenance shops contend with. It also aims to bolster the sales and marketing department, planning on extending the company’s reach and getting the message out. In addition, part of the financing will also go towards improving client efficiency and to scale up the business.
“The feedback to our solution has been extremely encouraging. Our customers have seen our track record at continuing to make our software better and better. We release updates every two weeks, for which we get a lot of positive feedback,” said Findlay. The company has over a 99 percent retention rate and enjoys a presence across all 50 U.S. states and most of the Canadian provinces.
With this investment, Vinay Kashyap, a partner at Mainsail, and Jason Frankel, vice president at Mainsail, will join Fullbay’s board of directors. “We believe the heavy-duty fleet operations and repair market is evolving rapidly, driven by a variety of market forces,” said Kashyap. “The industry is experiencing a national shortage of technicians coupled with an increase in interstate traffic, and that’s putting stress on HDT repair shops. Fullbay has experienced rapid growth while remaining profitable, which is a testament to the Fullbay team and the product they have built for this market.”