Chris Spanos and the business of knowing help is on the way

A tow truck could be ten minutes late and still leave a customer reassured. Chris Spanos had noticed this curious bit of roadside arithmetic. In a 2015 interview, he described a promised twenty-minute arrival becoming thirty minutes in traffic. Customers could tolerate the delay when they could watch the truck coming. The extra time mattered. So did having some evidence that help existed.

It was a small observation with room for a business inside it. A car has stopped working; the person beside it has somewhere else to be. A cheerful estimate from a distant operator can begin to sound like a weather forecast. A moving dot gives the stranded driver something more useful to do than rehearse an increasingly pointed follow-up call.

Spanos helped build Urgently around that gap between a promise and a visible response. His career has since taken him into rental housing and municipal compliance, territory with fewer tow trucks and considerably more paperwork. The connecting interest is easy to recognize: give people a clearer view of the service they are depending on.

The business hiding in the wait

Urgently was founded in 2013. Spanos and his fellow founders had experienced the frustrations of getting roadside help themselves. Smartphones were already changing how people summoned rides. It was reasonable to ask why a driver could follow a car taking them to dinner but have so little useful information about the truck coming to rescue their own.

The early consumer proposition was direct. Choose the roadside service you need, request assistance, and get connected to an available provider. Towing, tire trouble, lockouts and jump starts were ordinary problems, repeated often enough to support an entire industry. Urgently brought location and availability into the transaction. The vehicle carrying the solution could become visible to the person waiting for it.

In a Baltimore television appearance, Spanos explained that service providers carried the app in their vehicles. That let the company know where they were, whether they were available and what equipment they had. A nearby truck is useful only if it can perform the job. Distance alone cannot tell the whole story.

There was another audience to persuade: the businesses doing the towing. Spanos described offering providers better payment terms and less administrative trouble. His explanation was practical. These were business owners with their own costs and ambitions. A new dispatch system needed to earn a place in their working day. The app could make an introduction; the commercial arrangement had to make the introduction worthwhile.

“Knowledge is power, transparency is comfort.”

Chris Spanos, 2015

A résumé with several exits

Spanos arrived at roadside assistance after a career that had already crossed several kinds of business. He studied economics at the University of Mary Washington. His work included MCI, AOL Local and Repair.com, giving him experience in marketing, local discovery and the difficult business of connecting a customer with somebody who could actually do a job.

At AOL, he held product and management roles; his later biography credits him with turning around the local business. He also founded SeniorChecked, a background-screening business acquired in 2011. Those are useful antecedents for Urgently. Local services involve finding the right provider, establishing confidence and getting a transaction through all the little obstacles that a directory listing leaves unresolved.

Then there is the film work. Spanos produced films that appeared at Sundance and SXSW. He also co-founded Animators at Law in 1995, working with digital animation for jury trials. His credits include the 2008 short film Haber, directed by Daniel Ragussis. The résumé leaves room for a screening room as well as a boardroom.

It would be too tidy to assign every later business decision to those earlier experiences. Still, the range is part of his story. He had worked on helping audiences understand something, helping customers find something and helping businesses sell something before asking people to trust a roadside service on a phone. The work changed; explaining an unfamiliar proposition kept coming with the territory.

When the carmakers came calling

By January 2019, the roadside proposition had attracted manufacturers whose reputations travel with every car they sell. Porsche Ventures, BMW i Ventures and Jaguar Land Rover’s InMotion Ventures participated in a $21 million financing round. Spanos was leading a company whose service could become part of somebody else’s relationship with a driver.

Porsche’s interest makes sense at the level of a single customer. A carefully designed ownership experience meets a rather unforgiving test when a vehicle will not move. The badge remains on the bonnet while the customer waits. The quality of that wait, and the response that ends it, belongs to the brand experience too.

BMW’s announcement described a platform covering more than 45,000 connected service vehicles. Matching considered location, provider ratings and equipment, with tracking, communications and arrival estimates connected through the system. That was the operational substance behind the phone screen. The driver saw a response; several businesses needed to coordinate to deliver it.

That coordination made the system relevant to the dealership as well as the customer. BMW described sharing information across manufacturers, dealerships, providers and drivers. Each participant had a different reason to care about the same incident. A driver needed a useful arrival estimate. A provider needed a job it could perform. The automotive partner needed to understand what its customer was experiencing after the sale.

The company’s growth brought outside recognition. In 2019, Urgently ranked No. 12 on the Inc. 5000 and No. 6 on Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500. Spanos received EY’s Mid-Atlantic Entrepreneur Of The Year award in the Technology category. He shared the credit with his colleagues: “I share this award with the entire Urgently team.” An award has one name on it more easily than an operating business does.

The EY award was presented on June 13, 2019, at a Washington gala, after selection by an independent judging panel. The regional technology category put a name to a period of public recognition for the business. Urgently appeared on the Inc. 5000 again in 2020, 2021 and 2022. Spanos’s operating history includes those successive listings alongside the more memorable automotive names in the financing announcements.

The future still needed a truck

Spanos’s view of transportation allowed for considerable technological change and a stubborn amount of mechanical continuity. Electric and autonomous vehicles could alter ownership and travel. Vehicles would still stop working. Someone would still need to reach them, diagnose the problem and help them move again.

That outlook gave Urgently a reason to look beyond the driver manually asking for help. Spanos discussed machine-to-machine requests, with a vehicle or connected system initiating assistance. Automation could carry the message to a dispatch platform. The service professional would remain necessary at the other end. Software can arrange a tire change without acquiring the ability to lift a car.

In 2021, Urgently partnered with SparkCharge to expand access to mobile electric-vehicle charging. A depleted battery introduced a different roadside task, and the service network had to accommodate it. The partnership connected Spanos’s earlier thinking about electric vehicles with a service an owner could actually request.

His approach to investors was similarly concerned with keeping useful connections active. He advocated regular, open communication between board meetings, bringing investors into challenges and opportunities where they could contribute. Funding was one reason to have them involved. Their time, advice and practical help were others. The relationship needed some traffic between its formal appointments.

After August 2022, a different address

Spanos’s employment with Urgently ended on August 12, 2022, followed by an agreement to provide advisory services. The distinction matters to his biography. Urgently’s subsequent corporate life and his own next operating chapter have separate timelines. Being a founder remains part of a person’s history after the executive title changes hands.

By June 2025, he was publicly appearing as CEO of Riparian Technologies and co-COO of Riparian Holdings, a real estate business focused on single-family rentals. It was a move into the daily demands of managing homes: a setting where technology has to work around properties, people and local requirements.

His next venture, Pane, grew out of operational problems at Riparian. By 2026, Spanos was identified as Pane’s co-founder and CEO, while advising Riparian on technology and operations. The new company addresses municipal property compliance for owners, operators and lenders. A citation may be a small document. Across a property portfolio, keeping track of those documents becomes substantial work.

Pane gathers municipal records, organizes violations and enforcement information, and monitors properties over time. Its product turns scattered local information into something a portfolio team can review together. The municipal record already exists. The work is in making it findable, comparable and timely enough to act on.

The resemblance to the roadside work is an interpretation of his career, rather than a claim that the businesses are interchangeable. A tow truck and a municipal notice require different responses. Both become harder to manage when the relevant information sits somewhere the responsible person cannot readily see.

Spanos’s latest chapter gives that old interest a new address. Earlier, a driver wanted to know whether help was coming. Now, an operator wants to know what needs attention across a collection of homes. The useful thing is still the information that arrives in time to change what somebody does next.