Partly raises $37 million in Series A funding

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Partly has succeeded in raising $37 million in Series A funding from a group of venture capitalist firms in Australiasia and Europe, the car parts startup said.

The funding round, led by Octopus Ventures, Square Peg Capital and Blackbird Ventures is the largest ever capital raise by a New Zealand startup, Partly claimed.

Christchurch-based Partly builds tools using vehicle parts data to connect buyers and sellers in the world's car parts market, estimated to be worth $1.9 trillion.

It was established two years ago by Nathan Taylor, Evan Jia, Levi Fawcet, Mark Song and Tony Austin.

Fawcett, who is Partly's chief executive and a former Rocket Labs engineer said the startup's list of customers include multiple Fortune 500 companies.

Partly seeks to develop precise algorithms that let buyers find all correct parts for cars by looking at a license plate, a challenge that Fawcett described as an "incredibly difficult technical problem that nobody has cracked."

Fawcett said Partly's team of data scientists, engineers and car industry veterans use bleeding edge technology such as the Rust memory-safe programming language, Apache Software Foundation's open source Kafka distributed event store and stream processing platform, and the ScyllaDB NoSQL database to manage millions of change a minute from thousands of sources.

Partly said it is expanding worldwide, and claims to be powering over $150 million in direct annual orers, and over $4 billion in indirect ones.