Garage Raises $41M to Reinvent the Used Fire Truck Market With AI

Garage is an AI-powered marketplace that helps municipalities buy, sell, appraise, and arrange transportation for used fire trucks and other public-service vehicles.

When South Charleston, West Virginia, put some of its surplus vehicles up for sale last year, the city had budgeted for a few hundred thousand dollars.

It brought in $1.2 million.

Part of that money went toward cancer screenings for the city's firefighters, according to Garage, the online marketplace that handled the sales.

Garage connects towns selling used fire engines, garbage trucks, school buses, and other heavy equipment with buyers across the country. On Tuesday, the startup announced a $41 million Series B led by Invus Opportunities, with participation from Initialized Capital, Y Combinator, Infinity Ventures, Benchstrength, and FJ Labs. The round brings its total funding to $60 million and values the company at $225 million, Fortune reported.

The company is already operating at real scale. More than 1,000 cities and towns across all 50 states use Garage, and the platform now handles more than $100 million in transactions on an annualized basis. For local governments, that adds up to money they didn't have before: cash from selling old equipment at fair prices, and savings from buying used instead of new. CEO Martin Hunt said towns are putting those funds toward firefighters, schools, roads, and local jobs without raising taxes.

Buying and selling the vehicles that keep towns running, from fire engines to garbage trucks to school buses, is still a patchwork process. Prices are hard to find, deals are scattered, and much of the work still happens offline.

When a fire department buys a new truck, it usually needs to sell the old one to help cover the cost. For decades, that meant calling other departments one by one or dumping the vehicle at a local auction, where a perfectly usable engine could sell for little more than scrap.

And buying new has turned into a crisis of its own. The price of a new fire engine has roughly doubled since 2020, according to the International Association of Fire Fighters, and departments that once waited about 18 months for delivery are now being told to expect as long as four and a half years. The union blames industry consolidation and has called for a federal investigation, while manufacturers point to inflation, supply chain problems, and surging demand.

That squeeze is pushing more departments toward used trucks. A new rig can cost up to $2 million; Garage says a quality used one on its platform runs about $150,000.

CEO Martin Hunt knows the problem firsthand. He joined his local volunteer fire company in Delaware as a teenager and ended up in charge of selling its old trucks. He later went to Columbia University and worked in private equity at Goldman Sachs before quitting in late 2023 to start Garage with Alaz Sengul, a software engineer who previously worked at Twitter. The pair went through Y Combinator in early 2024.

There's no Kelley Blue Book for a 30-year-old ladder truck. Garage's appraisal tool fills that gap, using sales data to estimate what specialized municipal vehicles are actually worth so buyers and sellers have a fair starting point.

The second problem is shipping. Buyers can enter a ZIP code and get an instant freight quote, and Garage's software coordinates the move without human dispatchers. That matters because these deals are rarely local: the average vehicle on the platform travels about 1,400 miles to its new home.

That automation is a big part of the investor pitch. Invus partner Bryan Kim pointed to Garage hitting $100 million in annual sales without a single logistics employee.

Much of the AI money in Silicon Valley is flowing to companies building chatbots and the models behind them. Garage represents a different wager: that some of the clearest returns will come from applying AI to old, fragmented industries that still run on paper and phone calls.

And it's growing fast. Garage says its sales volume jumped more than 400% over the past year, and it also works with communities in Canada. The company makes money by taking roughly a 10% cut on transactions, according to Fortune, though it hasn't disclosed revenue.

Garage plans to use the new funding to hire and expand further into sanitation and public works. Private sanitation companies are already its fastest-growing customers, Hunt told Fortune.

And even in fire trucks, its biggest category, Hunt estimates Garage handles only about 1% of the market. There's plenty of road left.

Editor’s Note: This article was created by Alicia Shapiro, CMO of AiNews.com, with writing support, AEO/GEO/SEO optimization, image concept development, and editorial structuring support from ChatGPT, an AI assistant. All final editorial decisions, perspectives, and publishing choices were made by Alicia Shapiro.