Corey Brundage and the Trouble With Getting Help

Corey Brundage had managed to get himself to the car. Getting help for the car was proving more difficult. In December 2013, his fiancée had a dead battery, and he reached her using Uber. The ride worked as expected. Arranging roadside assistance introduced an unwelcome round of searching, calling and negotiating. A small mechanical problem had acquired a surprisingly elaborate administrative life.

For Brundage, the comparison was hard to leave alone. A phone could arrange transportation for a person. Why did arranging assistance for a vehicle feel so much less certain? It was the sort of complaint that normally expires when the engine starts. He carried it into the following year and founded HONK.

By April 2026, the business would change hands, combine with CurbsideSOS and get a new chief executive. Between those two moments lay the more revealing part of his story: learning how to make a useful idea acceptable to the people expected to deliver it. The driver with a problem was only the beginning.

A career in connecting things

Before tow trucks, there were business telephone systems. A 2007 Fonality announcement identified Brundage as director of product management. By December 2008, he was discussing the company’s integration with Salesforce as vice president of marketing and product management. His subject was a familiar office frustration: customer software could hold plenty of information while remaining oddly uninformed about what happened on the telephone.

Brundage explained the product as a way to bring phone systems, contact centers and customer records together. The practical attraction was that managers could see more of an operation without having to assemble an expensive custom project themselves. A conversation and a database entry belonged to the same customer. The systems needed an introduction.

There is a recognizable connection to his later work, even across the considerable distance between a desk phone and a tow truck. In both settings, separate activities had to become one experience for the customer. A beautifully organized record is of limited comfort when nobody knows what happened to the call.

His entrepreneurial history also extended beyond HONK. His public founder biography names betterSHIFT, KorMethod, SendLove.to and Sentient Systems, and describes him as an investor and startup advisor. HONK arrived with that experience behind it. He had already spent time turning ideas into products and finding out whether anyone wanted them.

The person who unplugged the tablet

Early HONK testing supplied a lesson a founder could hardly miss. Brundage put tablets in tow trucks. Sometimes the devices disappeared from the map because drivers put them under seats or disconnected them. For hourly drivers, additional jobs could mean more work without additional earnings.

That detail complicates the usual account of an entrepreneur discovering an inefficient industry. The person receiving the technology could have perfectly sensible reasons for resisting it. Brundage had to learn how the work paid, then adjust the service around the businesses doing it.

“Just because you can, it doesn’t mean you should.”

Corey Brundage, on starting an on-demand business, 2015

He would later advise founders to test ideas aggressively and solve a substantial business problem. The tablet episode gives that advice a useful physical object. You can design a button, buy a device and place it in a truck. The person holding the power cable still gets a vote.

His 2015 explanation of HONK put provider economics beside customer convenience. Operators needed worthwhile jobs and less unnecessary travel between them. Motorists wanted speed, quality and a price they understood. A viable service had to connect those interests repeatedly, across different places and working days.

Selling the promise, one job at a time

HONK announced its nationwide consumer launch on November 19, 2014. The proposition was direct: request roadside assistance through a phone or website and pay when you needed it, without an annual membership. The company announced $1.8 million in seed funding alongside that debut.

Launch coverage described a network of more than 20,000 trucks drawn from 3,600 partners. Those were independent businesses already performing roadside work. Brundage was bringing a new route to the customer, with booking and dispatch organized through software. He could build on an existing supply of professional equipment and experience.

The services were refreshingly ordinary: unlock a car, change a tire, deliver fuel, jump-start a battery, arrange a tow. Nobody wants an imaginative interpretation of a tire change. The opportunity was to improve how the job was ordered, priced and communicated, so a motorist could stop wondering what would happen next.

In a March 2016 television interview, Brundage emphasized advance pricing. You get to see our price in advance, he said. The service then advertised starting prices around $49. Those were historical launch-era prices, but the concern behind the pitch remains easy to recognize. A customer standing beside a disabled car is in a poor position to conduct a leisurely market survey.

There was a useful restraint in this offer. The company could describe a bounded task, with a booking and a price, instead of asking a customer to decide on a lasting membership during an inconvenient afternoon. Whether that suited a particular driver depended on their circumstances. The appeal lay in having another way to arrange the work.

The operator’s side was visible too. Eric Haber, owner of a local towing partner, described receiving a request and responding through the app to say whether the business could accept it. The exchange sounds simple. It contains a decision that any account of frictionless service needs to respect: somebody has to agree to do the work.

Brundage took the message to the Connected Car Expo in Los Angeles in 2015. That setting suited the larger ambition he was describing at the time: an automotive service business reaching beyond a single roadside incident. He wanted HONK to become useful throughout vehicle ownership. The breakdown provided an entry point into a much longer relationship with the car.

The insurer enters the picture

Farmers Insurance partnered with HONK in 2017 to use its technology under the insurer’s own brand. For Brundage, that meant the service could be working even when the consumer did not set out to find HONK. The business helping organize the rescue and the brand a customer remembered could be different organizations.

This arrangement adds another layer of responsibility to the original consumer proposition. The motorist needs help; the insurer has a relationship to maintain; the operator has a business to run. An arrival estimate now matters to more than the person watching the clock. It also helps another company understand whether a promise made in its name is being kept.

By 2020, Brundage was writing about customer satisfaction for insurers. He proposed looking at automation, analytics and the quality of outside partners. A service partner’s performance, he argued, could affect how the customer felt about the insurer. He urged carriers to establish measures, examine the information and act when performance fell short.

The interest in measurement fits his earlier product work. What information belongs together? Which interaction is going unseen? A business can count completed requests and still learn too little about the customer’s experience. Brundage’s prescription was to look closely at the exchanges around a service, including the work done by third parties.

This is where his story becomes less tidy and more interesting than its opening. A dead battery offers a crisp origin. Keeping separate businesses coordinated offers no comparable finish line. The task keeps returning with each request, each provider and each enterprise relationship. Better software creates an opportunity to see what is happening. The organization still has to respond to what it sees.

A founder becomes a founder again

On April 6, 2026, HONK announced the sale of its business to Frontenac and the acquisition of CurbsideSOS at closing. The combined company’s new leadership included Adam DeWitt as CEO, Matt Maloney as chairman, Eric Ferguson as COO and Morgan Hughes as CFO. The group brought experience from Grubhub.

Brundage spoke in the announcement as HONK’s founder. His description of the work centered on secondary tows, accident handling and transparency. Those concerns show how far the operation had traveled from a consumer app for ordering a jump-start. Where a vehicle goes after the first tow can matter as much as getting a truck to it.

The leadership change closes his chapter as CEO while the service continues under new management. It also brings the original problem into sharper focus. Behind every request sit decisions about location, equipment, timing, payment and destination. The customer has a simpler description: please get me moving.

Brundage began by being annoyed that help was difficult to arrange. His years at HONK exposed how many people had to find the arrangement worthwhile. The app could carry the request. The business had to earn the answer.