RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK – Seven years into its existence, the shine is only getting brighter for Spiffy, the vehicle services and maintenance venture that today is announcing closing on another $22 million in venture capital.
“We started Spiffy on a path towards becoming a complete car care solution for individual customers and fleet clients. Today serves as both a humbling reminder of the progress we’ve made in the last seven years and a thrilling look ahead at what we’re going to achieve next,” said Scot Wingo, Spiffy’s CEO and a serial entrepreneur, in announcing the funding.
And Wingo sees an “interesting phase” for the fast-growing company – from more geographical expansion to securing more franchises and adding services such as tires.
Scot Wingo
Now at 26 corporate operations and 10 franchises, Wingo says: “We’re in an interesting phase where we have so much new business in existing markets we probably will only add 2-4 next year on the corporate side, but will add another 15-20 franchise markets over the next year.”
The funding from a variety of investors comes as Spiffy is capitalizing on one of its newest geographical markets: Tennessee.
“Tennessee is a top focus for us,” he tells WRAL TechWire. “Since we only closed Sept. 15, we’re only 30-days into the market and already seeing very robust demand for our services there on both the fleet and consumer side.”
And now comes the next step: tires, joining services such as cleaning, oil changes and sanitization.
“We’re still piloting consumer tires in raleigh and the second phase of that will be improvements on the buying experience through our app coming next year,” Wingo says. “Fleet tires we’re scaling up in more than 10 locations right now.”
Investors in the Series B round include: Tribeca Venture Partners, Bull City Venture Partners, Shell Ventures, Idea Fund Partners, Trog Hawley Capital, and Attinger. Goodyear Ventures, Private Access Network, Gaingels, and Flucas Ventures join the backers as new investors.
Spiffy had already raised some $22 million since launch, according to Crunchbase. And Wingo as well as the investors see a growing market opportunity.
“Spiffy plans to continue to establish itself as a premier mobile car care and maintenance provider in a United States automotive repair and maintenance services market projected to reach $250B by 2026, up over 24% from $201B in 20201,” the company said in the funding announcement. citing research from 360 Market Updates.
And the company continues to add workers as it grows reach and services.
Spiffy acquires Tennessee firm in move to provide more vehicle services
“At the HQ we have about 50 folks and are pretty good there for the time being,” Wingo explains. “We’ve ramped our technicians up to over 400 and are hiring very aggressively in the operations side of the busines.”
Just over a year ago when the COVID-19 pandemic struck, Spiffy like many businesses was basically frozen in place. Now …
“As you’ve pointed out before, we have a lot going on at Spiffy – tires, new geos,” Wingo says, referrring to TechWire. “This funding allows us to continue to expand across all those degrees of growth and innovation.”
Spiffy offers apps to support its growing network and also is expanding technology to find more customers.
“We have several mechanisms – on the consumer side, if someone downloads the app and requests a service, we track that. We’re not able to get to 100% of the requests do to geographical constraints or capacity constraints and we track that difference where demand,” he says. “On the fleet side, we track it by opportunities that come inbound to us or our sales team uncovers.”
Franchise plan is giving a new shine to Spiffy’s growth profile, says CEO Wingo
