Partly Group Ltd., a New Zealand startup using artificial intelligence to change up the automotive parts business, announced today that it has raised $50 million new funding at a $500 million valuation.

It’s also opening its first U.S. operation, betting that the country’s collision repair sector is ready to buy software it has so far had to do without. Founded in 2020 by former Rocket Lab Corp. engineer Levi Fawcett, Partly builds what it calls Interpreter, a foundation model trained specifically on vehicle parts.

The pitch is narrow on purpose. General-purpose models cannot reliably tell one part variant from another across the dozens of ways manufacturers structure their catalogs and Partly has spent more than four years and $10 million building one that can.

Interpreter is multimodal. It reads technical diagrams, damage photos and written repair descriptions, then maps them to a single standard for how a vehicle breaks into assemblies and how parts within those assemblies are named. The company sources training data from government records and licensed manufacturer feeds, runs its own vehicle tear-downs and has parts interpreters annotate the results by hand. More than 50 manufacturer agreements feed it. Partly says the model now covers 91% of vehicles across the top 58 manufacturers.

Most body shops still order parts by hand. That is slow and the mistakes cost real money. A misidentified part means a returned order, a delayed repair and a supplementary claim. Partly says shops using Interpreter process orders nine times faster and cut returns by a factor of 2.4.

The U.S. is the company’s reason for the raise. Roughly 250,000 repairers operate in a collision market Partly pegs at more than $100 billion and it argues that none of them has had access to AI built for the job.

“We have spent five years building the AI infrastructure layer that the industry has been missing,” Fawcett said. “The model architecture is extremely nuanced, there’s a reason general models don’t solve it and why we’ve been able to own the frontier AI here.”

Partly has put its U.S. base in Austin, Texas and moved its core executive team there, Fawcett added. It’s hiring across engineering, business development and product management.

The expansion is a long way from the company’s roots. Its engineering ranks include alumni of Google LLC, Apple Inc. and Fawcett’s former employer Rocket Lab.

The Series B round was led by DST Global Advisors Ltd., an early backer of Anthropic PBC, Meta Platforms Inc. and Airbnb Inc. Partly closed what was then the largest Series A in New Zealand history in late 2022, raising NZ$37 million ($21 million) at a NZ$180 million valuation in a round led by Octopus Ventures Ltd.

Photo: Partly