Openbay, an award-winning online marketplace for automotive repair and services and a provider of SaaS based solutions for the automotive aftermarket industry, announced it closed an $8M Series A round of financing. Shell Ventures LLC led the round with participation from existing investor Stage 1 Ventures. The new round will be used to bring to market artificial intelligence (AI) enabled solutions for businesses that provide automotive repair services and to grow existing and new markets across all its offerings.
Openbay provides an online marketplace that empowers consumers to conveniently locate automotive service providers, compare price quotes for services and transact for automotive maintenance services.
Openbay's vision has not changed since its inception: fundamentally improve the experience for automotive repair and services for consumers, and the way that automotive care businesses acquire and service customers. Consumers expect their interactions across websites, social platforms, mobile and messaging apps to be engaging and interactive. This requires natural-language processing, machine learning and predictive analytics," said Rob Infantino, founder and CEO of Openbay. "With fresh capital and depth of the resources our strategic and global investors bring to Openbay, the company is now well positioned to grow and expand its offering globally."
Commenting on the announcement, Huibert Vigeveno, Executive Vice President for Global Commercial, Shell, said, "Digital and services partnerships provide exciting prospects and new revenues for Shell's Marketing businesses. Understanding customer needs and reducing customer friction is at the heart of our thinking. We scan the market for emerging technology trends and look for disruptive or transformational technologies, and investing in promising technologies such as Openbay is very much part of our future growth strategy."
About Openbay Openbay is an online marketplace and SaaS software company transforming the experience for automotive repair and services for consumers and the way that automotive care businesses acquire and service customers. Headquartered in Cambridge, MA, Openbay is privately held. Its investors include Shell Global Commercial, Stage 1 Ventures, Boston Seed Capital, GV (formerly Google Ventures), a16z seed, and several individual investors. Openbay holds an A+ rating from the Better Business Bureau. For more information, visit openbay.comAbout Shell Lubricants Shell Lubricants produces and sells a wide range of lubricants catered to a wide range of customers in 120 countries — from consumers to business customers. Shell produces lubricants used in sectors such as consumer motoring, heavy duty transport, mining, power generation, general manufacturing, etc. Our brands include Pennzoil, Quaker State, Shell Helix, Shell Advance, Shell Rotella and Shell Rimula, Shell Tellus and Shell Gadus. Our robust supply chain allows us to bring our products to customers globally. This includes five base oil plants, 40 lubricants blending (and packaging) plants and ten grease production plants across the globe, in 32 countries around the world. Shell's strong heritage in technology for lubricants traces back to more than 70 years. We have over 200 scientists and engineers that work in specialised technical centres for lubricants in China, Japan, Germany and the US. We hold over 150 patents for base oils, lubricants and greases and carry out millions of trials every year. Our partnerships with OEMs help us to continue to work on producing high quality lubricants. We also work with top motorsports teams like Scuderia Ferrari, MBW Motorsport, Hyundai Motorsport and Ducati Corse to use racing as a test bed to bring race quality lubricants to customers on the road. We also offer a wide range of technical services to our customers, namely Shell LubeMatch, Shell LubeAdvisor and Shell LubeChat. For more information, logon to www.shell.com.
About Stage 1 Ventures Stage 1 Ventures is an early stage venture capital firm seeking to build partnerships with great entrepreneurs who want to build meaningful companies. Stage 1 spans the "Capital Gap" for early stage entrepreneurs with capital efficient fund models for Limited Partners. Stage 1's management team has invested in more than 100 leading companies over the last twenty years, roughly half of them in the mid-Atlantic region, and has produced almost $1 billion of investment proceeds. For more information, visit www.stage1ventures.com.
