A software company that began in a Christchurch flat is now one of the most valuable startups New Zealand has produced. Partly, which builds artificial intelligence for the car parts and collision repair trade, has closed a US$50 million Series B funding round, worth roughly NZ$85 million at current exchange rates, in a deal that values the business at US$500 million and pushes it close to the NZ$1 billion mark that would make it a fully fledged New Zealand unicorn.
The round was led by DST Global, the investment firm founded by Russian-Israeli billionaire Yuri Milner that has previously backed Facebook, Spotify and Airbnb. Partly described the raise as a partial close and said it does not expect to seek further funding until 2027. The deal lifts the company’s total capital raised to US$92.4 million, building on a US$37 million Series A in December 2022 led by London firm Octopus Ventures, which valued Partly at US$180 million at the time. In under four years the company’s paper value has nearly tripled.
Partly was founded in 2020 by Levi Fawcett, a former Rocket Lab engineer and four-time founder, alongside a group of co-founders who have built the business into a team of about 160 people working across more than 20 countries. The core executive team has relocated to Austin, Texas, with a second office in San Francisco, although the company’s roots and a large share of its engineering talent remain firmly in New Zealand.
At the centre of the business is a product called Interpreter, which Partly describes as a foundation model purpose-built for automotive parts. The problem it sets out to solve is deceptively simple and genuinely hard. Anyone who has tried to order the correct part for a particular car knows that the same model can carry dozens of variations depending on trim level, build plant, engine option and model year. A single wrong digit in a part number can mean a panel that does not fit or a sensor that will not talk to the car. Partly says Interpreter works through those hundreds of millions of configurations to identify the exact part a specific vehicle needs.
The company argues that general purpose AI tools are poorly suited to the task. On an internal benchmark across 50 Toyota repair jobs, Partly says Interpreter scored 60 percent on a standard accuracy measure known as the F1 score, compared with 1 to 5 percent for general AI models. Whether or not those figures hold up under independent scrutiny, they point to why a niche, data-heavy problem has attracted serious investor money. Partly says the model was trained over five years using human feedback, synthetic data, more than 50 agreements with vehicle manufacturers and a continuous stream of live data.
“We have spent five years building the AI infrastructure layer that the industry has been missing,” chief executive Levi Fawcett said in the company’s announcement. He framed the moment in grand terms, telling investors that the auto industry had not seen change on this scale since the assembly line or the arrival of electric vehicles.
The new money is tied to an aggressive push into the United States. Partly says it is launching into a collision repair market worth more than US$100 billion a year and spread across roughly 250,000 repair shops, most of them independent operators rather than large chains. The company is recruiting for engineering, business development and product roles around its Austin base as it tries to turn its technology into paying American customers. That market is far larger than anything available at home, and it is where the company believes the next phase of its growth has to come from.
For New Zealand the story sits in familiar territory. The country has produced a steady run of technology companies that reach a certain size and then shift their centre of gravity overseas, following the customers and the capital. Rocket Lab, where Fawcett once worked, is the best known example, now listed in the United States while keeping its launch operations on the Mahia Peninsula. Xero built its base in Wellington before expanding aggressively abroad. The pattern raises an old question about whether New Zealand keeps enough of the value, the jobs and the tax base from the companies it incubates, even as it celebrates their success.
It also lands at an awkward moment for the wider economy. Local business confidence has been knocked by a fuel supply squeeze and a soft job market, with a recent Westpac survey showing worker confidence in finding a job at its lowest level since the measure began more than two decades ago. Against that backdrop, a homegrown firm attracting US$50 million from a marquee global investor is a reminder that parts of the New Zealand technology sector are still drawing serious international attention, even when the domestic mood is gloomy.
Not every New Zealand deep technology story is ending so well. In the same week, the Auckland wireless power-beaming startup Emrod, once held up as a symbol of Kiwi engineering ambition, was placed into liquidation by its shareholders. The contrast underlines how narrow the path is between a celebrated breakthrough and a quiet wind-up, and how much depends on finding paying customers before the money runs out. Partly’s bet is that the unglamorous business of matching the right part to the right car is a problem big enough, and dull enough, that the rest of the market has overlooked it.
What do you make of another New Zealand technology success heading offshore as it scales? Does it matter where these companies are headquartered as long as the jobs and the ideas start here? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
Sources Partly company announcement via PR Newswire, Tech Funding News and RNZ Business.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job π
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