Christchurch automotive software company Partly has raised a US$50 million Series B led by DST Global at a reported US$500 million valuation, and is moving its chief executive and core leadership team to Austin, Texas, the company announced in June 2026.
Partly is targeting one of the messier data problems in the car industry. There are more than a billion vehicles on the road and every manufacturer catalogues its parts differently, so one model can carry many variants by trim, engine and build year. A single wrong digit means a part that does not fit, a return, and a car that stays in the workshop longer.
The model
Founder and chief executive Levi Fawcett, a former Rocket Lab engineer, started Partly in Christchurch in 2020. The company has built a foundation model called Interpreter, trained specifically on automotive parts data, which it uses to identify the correct part, source it and handle logistics for repair businesses. The seventh version of the model is in training, Tech Funding News reported.
Fawcett has argued that general-purpose AI models perform poorly on the task. He told Tech Funding News that leading general models such as GPT-5 and Claude Opus 4.8 were “going to be very bad” at questions about parts, adding that the company’s own system “really has started working in the last six to nine months.”
According to the company, Partly has more than 1,000 customers and agreements with more than 50 manufacturers, and the UK is its largest market.
The raise
The round was a partial close led by DST Global, the investment firm known for early backing of Meta, Airbnb and Spotify. Existing investors include Blackbird and Octopus Ventures, which led a US$37 million Series A in December 2022. Partly has now raised about US$92.4 million in total, Tech Funding News reported.
The move
The new capital is aimed at the US, which Partly describes as the world’s largest automotive repair market. Tech Funding News put the US collision repair sector at more than US$100 billion a year across about 250,000 independent shops. Partly is establishing a US headquarters in Austin, with a second office in San Francisco, and Fawcett and the core executive team are relocating. Engineering will remain in Christchurch.
Jack’s take
This is a great raise for a New Zealand company and a model built for one narrow, painful job is exactly where AI money is going. But it made two ANZ companies in one week moving their head office to the US. The engineering staying in Christchurch is good news, but where the decisions get made is a different question.