Technology

The long-term future of transportation might see less people owning cars, but today a lot of private vehicles are still on the road, and now a startup thatbuilding a multi-faceted marketplace to help fix them has raised some funding. Caroobi, a Berlin company that connects individuals with mechanics, and mechanics with parts suppliers, has picked up $20 million, money that it plans to use to expand its business into new markets — itactive today only in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and is just starting to open for business in the UK — and its platform to cover a wider range of services.

The Series B round was led by NGP Capital, formerly known as Nokia Growth Partners, a fund backed by the Finnish telecoms giant. This is part of its &smart mobility& investment strategy.

&We are looking for promising companies in the mobility sector globally and believe that the integrated model across the value chain that Caroobi is building has huge potential. The team is great and we are looking forward to supporting the companyinternational expansion and building a global category winner,& saidWalter Masalin, Partner at NGP Capital, in a statement.

Other investors in this round include Target Global, BMW iVentures, DN Capital and Cherry Ventures.

The BMW investment is financial, co-founder and MD of Caroobi Mark Michl said in an interview, with no strategic plans for now between the two. Although BMW an iconically German company, the iVentures arm is actually in the Bay Area; Caroobi, in fact, is iVentures& first investment in BMWhome country.

Caroobi is not disclosing its valuation but I understand that it is now over $100 million. The company is not yet profitable, by design, and has raised around $30 million to date.

The amount of this investment is notable when you consider the size of it versus the potential of Caroobibusiness today. The company says that in its current German footprint, for example, it works with only 750 mechanics today, but with a total addressable market of around 35,000 mechanics. Itcurrently servicing some 2,000 cars per month and growing 100 percent month-over-month.

&The market potential is huge, and we currently have well below only one percent of it,& Michl said.

As Michl and his co-founderNico Weiler explain it, Caroobi is providing a platform to fill what is effectively a gap in the legacy automotive market.

In many countries, one of the most common routes for repairing a car, or getting it serviced, is to use an independent garage or mechanic. But these days, as much of the process of finding and contacting tradespeople has moved online, much of the mechanic world has not come along.

You may find some recommendations on services like Yelp, and even some targeted directories that help direct referrals for independent mechanics to quote for work, such as WhoCanFixMyCar in the UK, or even services that come to you on-demand, such as YourMechanic in the US.

But whatlargely lacking is a platform that not only helps match up car owners with mechanics and their garages, but also provides those customers with transparent price lists and helps to manage not just bookings, but payments and potentially disputes (and soon, service guarantees). On top of that, the Caroobi platform offers services to the mechanics themselves.

&There are two customers we are addressing,& said Michl. &One is consumers, who often may not know if mechanics are offering them fair quality and price. We are getting around that by offering services directly to customers,& he said. &Two is the mechanic.&

Mechanics services come in two parts, Weiler said. The first is the customer-facing side, Caroobi is giving mechanics are more efficient way of interfacing with customers, with accounting and billing software that links up with Caroobiback-end, and scheduling tools to book in appointments. Weiler said that Caroobicustomer referrals typically account for 50 percent & 60 percent of all mechanics& jobs once they join.

The second is the supplier-facing side, which is a newer area of business for Caroobi. Mechanics typically work with either a small group of distributors, or more likely one or two purchasing groups, which gives the mechanics less flexibilty in what they can order, the general supply levels, and how much everything costs. Caroobi currently sources parts from over 100 distributors and manufacturers, giving those mechanics a better selection and likely more competitive pricing.

&For mechanics, the parts acquisition process has always been intransparent and inefficient. By sourcing our parts directly from manufacturers we are establishing a lean, efficient process in the market, which becomes more cost effective for our customers and partner mechanics.& Michl said.

Caroobi is not disclosing what this works out to in terms of actual prices, or what kind of a cut Caroobi gets from it. Michl does say that the company takes a small percentage for every kind of transaction, and that these often work out to be competitive or even cheaper than what the mechanic might have charged, were he working directly.

A lot of people who&ve been working in the venture industry — even for many years — haven&t seen a true down cycle.

Somewhat ironically, Priti Youssef Choksi, a newly minted VC, knows very well what one looks like. The newest partner of the multi-stage investment firm Norwest Venture Partners has been working in tech since before the last boom and bust — and she has lessons to share about both good times and bad.

It all started in her native Mumbai (&Bombay to me!& she says). Choksi didn&t tell her parents when, as a teenager, she applied to the University of Pennsylvania to study architecture and business. &I couldn&t study both back home,& she says, somewhat sheepishly from Norwestglass-lined new offices in San FranciscoSouth Park neighborhood.

Instead of wind up at an architecture firm, she landed at Broadview Associates, an investment bank that was based in the Bay Area and advised dozens of tech companies during the go-go dot.com days — before nosediving along with the market. (In 2003, it was acquired by bigger rival Jefferies.)

By then, Choksi had already joined one of the bankclients, an internet marketing company called USWeb whose CEO asked her to work for him despite having no discrete job description. Looking back now, Choksi remembers the experience fondly, saying she ran strategy projects and competitive analysis of what others in the industry were doing as USWeb grew from a 200- to an 8,000-person operation. This being the dot com era, however, USWeb, which was renowned for its roll-up strategy at the time,merged with another company, which promptly went bankrupt.

Choksi again left before her employerdemise to join a streaming media company, but alas, it wasn&t meant to last long either, either, including because broadband connections didn&t yet exist to support startupvision. If at this point, Choksi felt ready to throw in the towel, she doesn&t seem to recall it. Instead, she entered into a one-year program at the Kellogg School to burnish her &soft skills and negotiating skills and things you don&t have time to practice& at a startup. Then she headed right back to Silicon Valley.

Her return would begin a second chapter of sorts. In fact, like a lot of people who came to the Bay Area in the &90s and who have stayed, Choksifortunes began to turn after the detritus of the bubbleburst began to blow away. First came a job at Google, where she stayed six years, holding roles in both strategic partnerships and, later, distribution partnerships, where she says she helped convince management to bundle the companysearch bar with other products to get it into the world more widely.

By 2009, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg — a former Google exec who&d seen Choksiwork — was reaching out to Choksi to ask if she would help run business development at Facebook, which itself was still privately held at the time. Choksi said yes, so thoroughly enjoying the company that five years later, she moved to the &dark side, doing M-A at Facebook& for another four years.

She notes that, by then, Facebook had &moved beyond acqui-hires to doing big tech bets& but like everyone in the M-A world,she wasn&t able to strike a deal with every interesting founder she met. Eventually, her abiding fascination with compelling founders and startups led her work with a recruiter earlier this year.

At first, she imagined she would take on yet another operating role at a small but growing company. Instead, Norwest managing partner Jeff Crowe raised his hand and asked for a meeting with her.It was apparently a match from the start. Sitting in an airy conference room, Choksi says of the move that she and Crowe were and remain &just very direct with each other.& Norwest was also, somewhat incredibly, the &only venture firm that invited me to a partner-and-pitch meeting& while it was trying to lure her into the fold, she says.

Crowe certainly sees Choksihire as a big win as the firm continues to build out it consumer-facing investment practice.

He volunteers that heparticularly appreciative of Choksities to Facebook and to the many people who&ve spun out of the company to work on their own projects. But he also recognizes her ability to identify a good opportunity when she sees one and to support founders as they grow their companies. &Somebody whobeen in the industry a long time, knows a lot of people, seen a lot of technologies, and worked with entrepreneurs both inside of out of companies like Facebook — including during their awkward teenage phase& says Crowe. &Itpretty exciting for us.&

The multi-billion dollar real estate developer and property manager JLL is getting into the tech investment game with the launch of a new $100 million fund run by corporate subsidiary JLL Spark.

Initially envisioned as a technology-focused business unit of the multinational real estate company, the firm eventually turned to the more traditional venture capital investment model as a way to get more exposure to all of the new technologies that are coming to market, according to JLL SParkco-chief executive Mihir Shah.

For Shah and his co-founder Yishai Lerner running the real estate companyinvestment firm is the first foray by either executive into the world of real estate or property technology. But both men have been working in the startup world of the Bay Area for at over a decade.

In fact, the two serial entrepreneurs launched one of their first companies from the TechCrunch 50 conference way back in 2007 (it was a mobile app that mimicked Yelp).

The two eventually sold their mobile review business to GroupOn and began doing some angel investing. It was during that venture into the wild world of seed stage prospecting that Shah got bitten by the real estate bug while trying to buy some commercial real estate.

&I was looking at the process and was thinking ‘Wow! That is not a modern process,'& Shah said.

Unbeknownst to Shah, at the same time he was looking for commercial real estate, the commercial real estate industry was looking for someone like him.

JLL had put out feelers and hired head hunters to find someone who could take the lead at the firmburgeoning technology practice, Shah said.

&They had all sorts of internal initiatives bringing in new technology companies and services to their existing clients,& Shah said. &They understood that technology was going to transform all aspects of the industry.&

One of the first steps that JLL had taken was to acquire Stessa, which developed and sold asset management software for the real estate industry. But Shah and Lerner quickly realized that the buy and build strategy wouldn&t be robust enough for JLLneeds.

&Over the last six months we saw how much innovation was happening in the proptech space and we thought it made more sense to launch a venture fund,& Shah said.

The firm will invest anywhere from a few hundred thousand dollars to a few million into seed stage or Series A companies with the option to dabble in later stage deals, according to Shah. The firm has made two investments so far — neither one of them in startups.

The commitments have been in one accelerator program, the New York-based Metaprop, which focuses on real estate tech investment, and Navitas Capital, which is billed as a later stage investor in the same space.

Both investments appear to be geared toward educating the firmtwo principals on the market and whatalready happening in the space.

The benefit that a corporate firm like JLL can provide to startups is the access to pilot projects where companies can deploy their technologies and, indeed, thatthe pitch that Shah makes to potential portfolio companies.

&Money is not enough,& he said. &Therea lot of products out there, but they&re struggling with distribution.& JLL has designated a few buildings in top cities around the world to fast track new technologies and provide trial spaces for them to develop, Shah told me. &Our value as a strategic is to build that bridge and make that connection.&

&Creating this $100 million venture fund through JLL Spark allows us to continue to lead the real estate industry in bringing the best proptech ideas to reality,& said Christian Ulbrich, JLLGlobal chief executive. &It complements and expands our substantial ongoing investments in innovative, cutting-edge digital solutions, which is a core part of our Beyond strategic vision and commitment to achieve ambitions for our clients.&