Triangle car startup secures $30 million to fuel growth plan

Get Spiffy, the mobile car service startup founded by Triangle serial entrepreneur Scot Wingo, announced on Wednesday it had completed a $30 million funding round to fuel its growth plans.

Launched in 2014, the company sought to rethink car washing by having consumers use a phone app to schedule Spiffy vans to come to their workplaces or homes. The Durham-based startup sent vans to the parking lots of area companies like Cisco, Red Hat, and Citrix — at the companies’ invitation.

Spiffy now has 500 technicians across 45 markets, and an additional 80 employees at its Durham headquarters, Wingo told The News & Observer. The company says it performs between 3,000 to 4,000 services each day and has grown by more than 90{49e09b23eae7466ccc7574c19ebb3019301c9a11d2999feff81a3526451546a5} in each of the past two years.

This expansion has been powered, in part, by the company’s focus on servicing larger fleets of commercial vehicles like those at rental car agencies. Spiffy also provides a range of other auto services, from windshield repairs to oil changes. It has also started offering Spiffy Tires and Spiffy Brakes services.

“Spiffy is scaling faster than any of my previous start-ups because we are meeting the quickly evolving preferences of convenience-oriented customers across our fleet and consumer verticals,” Wingo said in a statement announcing the Series C funding.

The money, Wingo hopes, will also help the company expand one of its newer offerings, Digital Servicing, which sells Spiffy software and vans to those who want to provide car care under their own brands.

This latest funding round was led by the New Jersey-based equity firm Edison Partners and involved Durham funding firms like Bull City Venture Partners and IDEA Fund Partners.

“(Spiffy is) one of the fastest growing companies at that scale in our region,” said Jason Caplain, general partner and cofounder of Bull City Venture Partners. “I think there’s a lot of runway to grow as they not only enter into new cities, which they’ve aggressively done, but also had an expansion of services.”

Caplain had invested in one of Wingo’s previous ventures, ChannelAdvisor, which went public in 2013 and was acquired by a private company last year. So when Caplain heard Wingo was starting Spiffy, he didn’t hesitate to get involved.

“We participated right from beginning,” he said. “Like we were the first check in along with Scot.”

This story was produced with financial support from a coalition of partners led by Innovate Raleigh as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. The N&O maintains full editorial control of the work.

This story was initially posted February 15, 2023, 7:49 AM.