Shopmonkey: Transforming the $500B Auto Repair Market

Ashot Iskandarian grew up ‘wrenching’, spending the weekends working on his 1995 BMW M3. Every chance he had, he’d hang around local car mechanic shops, learning hands-on how to fix cars. In parallel, as the son of an immigrant family which moved to the heart of Silicon Valley, Ashot gained his technical chops by working as a product manager at Intacct and Xactly. It wasn’t too long before Ashot realized how archaic the software solutions were for car mechanic shop owners. With his domain expertise and software capabilities, Ashot set out to build Shopmonkey, an end-to-end software solution for car mechanic shop owners. 

Each year, $500B is spent globally on car repair. The U.S. is still the second-largest passenger vehicle market, with more than 260 million registered passenger vehicles. It’s no surprise that we need many car mechanics to keep our cars up and running. That’s why, even today, there are 1.5 million car mechanic technicians in the U.S. Most of these businesses are mom and pop shops with 3 to 10 employees and operate independently of a dealership. Given these massive numbers, it’s astounding this market has yet to be disrupted by software. 

Owners of car mechanic shops have been largely ignored by technology companies. Most owners had to rely on clunky software built in the 1980s, hacking together three or four solutions to make something that worked. Many have spent tens of thousands of dollars on an antiquated payment processor which isn’t even connected to the internet. Every time a customer drops off their car, the mechanic has to spend time preparing an estimate. Then, there are numerous back and forth phone calls with the customer to approve the work and cost. That’s a poor experience for the customer and in a world of high consumer expectations, that’s a very big cost to a small business. In addition, many business owners have no idea how much time it actually takes to complete a job, making it difficult to know if their cost estimate was accurate.

This is the world Shopmonkey set out to modernize. Shopmonkey’s software and payments solution enables car mechanic shops to run their business from A to Z, including customer CRM, time tracking for technicians, point-of-sale integration and inventory management.   

Today, Shopmonkey is growing at more than 300% year-on-year and ShopMonkey’s dedication to its customers has led hundreds of small businesses to trust their livelihoods on Shopmonkey.  For the first time, shop owners can leverage technology to be more efficient, provide better customer experience and have more tools to grow their business.

We could not be more excited to be part of Shopmonkey’s quest and are thrilled to be leading the company’s $10M Series A with participation from I2BF and eVentures. We continue to believe that vertical-specific technologies can help small businesses thrive and Shopmonkey is set to transform one of the largest verticals in the U.S.