Openbay, a Cambridge-based online marketplace for automotive repair and services, announced on Monday it closed an $8M Series A round of financing.
Shell Ventures LLC led the round with participation from existing investor Stage 1 Ventures and an undisclosed, not institutional investor. Previous investors included Andreessen Horowitz and GV (formerly known as Google Ventures).
The new round will be used to hire more employees, scale the platform, add more customers and expand the marketplace outside the U.S., according to Openbay CEO and Founder Rob Infantino. In July, the company will move its office to Canal Park in East Cambridge.
Openbay will expand its team from the current 10 full-time employees and five consultants to "well over 30 people," Infantino said. The bulk of the new hires - around 12 people - will be in engineering and business development, especially mobile app, iOS, Android and Ruby developers. The company will also grow its sales and marketing team.
The new technical hires will be necessary to keep scaling the platform. Launched in October 2013, Openbay allows customers to compare quotes from nearby providers of car repair and maintenance services, and book appointments. The company also sells software to allow service station owners to better interact with potential customers online—and part of the Series A funding will be used to add new offerings in this area.
"What we're building doesn't exist today," Infantino said. "It will be part of our suite of SaaS services; there will be a chat component to it, but it's a lot more than that."
Infantino added that nowadays, people want to know that they will get an immediate response to whatever services that they're purchasing, and the automotive industry has been lacking an immediate form of communication for decades.
Currently, the company said it has a presence in all the 50 U.S. states, especially near the main metro areas. Thanks to the investment from Shell, Openbay is also planning an international expansion, but the declined to disclose to which market.
"You can only imagine where Shell will be helping us to take the product," Infantino said. "It's not Canada."
The company declined to disclose the name of the additional strategic investor who took part in its Series A round, nor the total funding to date.
