Partly raises $50M at a $500M valuation to crack the US auto parts market
Partly Group Ltd., a New Zealand startup using artificial intelligence to change up the automotive parts business, announced today that it has raised $50 million new funding at a $500 million valuation.
It’s also opening its first U.S. operation, betting that the country’s collision repair sector is ready to buy software it has so far had to do without. Founded in 2020 by former Rocket Lab Corp. engineer Levi Fawcett, Partly builds what it calls Interpreter, a foundation model trained specifically on vehicle parts.
The pitch is narrow on purpose. General-purpose models cannot reliably tell one part variant from another across the dozens of ways manufacturers structure their catalogs and Partly has spent more than four years and $10 million building one that can.
Interpreter is multimodal. It reads technical diagrams, damage photos and written repair descriptions, then maps them to a single standard for how a vehicle breaks into assemblies and how parts within those assemblies are named. The company sources training data from government records and licensed manufacturer feeds, runs its own vehicle tear-downs and has parts interpreters annotate the results by hand. More than 50 manufacturer agreements feed it. Partly says the model now covers 91% of vehicles across the top 58 manufacturers.
