The teenager who logged 1,500 hours of firefighter training now runs the marketplace for the trucks he used to ride.
He couldn't find a way to sell a used fire truck. So he built one - and now America's towns use it.
Somewhere in America right now, a fire chief is staring at a 1998 pumper that still runs but no longer passes inspection. It is worth real money. It weighs 19 tons. And until recently, the chief's options were a classified ad, a regional dealer, or a handshake with the department two counties over. Martin Hunt built the fourth option, and it lives at shopgarage.com.
Hunt is the co-founder and CEO of Garage, an AI-powered marketplace for the equipment that keeps American towns running - fire engines, ambulances, rescue rigs, and the kind of government surplus that no consumer site was ever built to move. Buy now or bid at auction. The platform appraises the asset, quotes the freight, writes the warranty, arranges the financing, and handles the paperwork. The hard parts of selling something enormous and expensive, in other words, become someone else's problem.
It is a deeply unglamorous business, and that is exactly the point. Hunt is not chasing the next consumer app. He is chasing the boring, gigantic machinery of municipal procurement - a roughly $1 trillion corner of the economy that runs on PDFs, phone calls, and institutional memory. In August 2025 the bet got a vote of confidence: a $13.5M Series A led by Infinity Ventures, on top of an earlier $4.5M seed, bringing Garage's total to $18M.
What makes the story land is where Hunt is standing when he tells it. He is not an outsider who spotted an inefficiency on a spreadsheet. He spent years inside the firehouse, holding the radio, watching the budget squeeze. He knows what a fire truck costs because he rode on one.
When I couldn't find anything, it became clear that there was a need for a streamlined, nationwide marketplace for expensive, hard-to-move equipment like fire trucks.
- Martin Hunt, on the moment Garage beganHunt grew up in a small town outside Wilmington, Delaware, and joined a volunteer fire department in 2015 at fifteen. This was not a weekend hobby with a t-shirt. He logged more than 1,500 hours of training and became a paid firefighter and EMT for the New Castle County Government, a job he held until 2021. Before most people his age had a first commute, he had a turnout coat and a pager.
Then came the swerve. Hunt enrolled at Columbia University, where he studied history with a concentration in business management, and after graduation took a seat at Goldman Sachs as a private-equity associate. Firehouse to Wall Street is not a common arc. He worked there from 2021 to 2023, learning how money moves through large, slow institutions - a skill that would turn out to be unexpectedly relevant.
The pull back to the fire service came through a phone call. A friend still in the field reached out, frustrated with how his department handled buying and selling equipment. Hunt went looking for a tool to recommend. He found nothing that worked. That absence - the missing product - was the whole opportunity.
I was a firefighter in Delaware and witnessed firsthand how painful it was to manage buying and selling equipment and vehicles.
- Martin HuntHunt teamed up with Alaz Sengul, a friend from Columbia of more than six years and a former software engineer at Twitter and MemAI. Sengul became CTO. Together they did the thing the advice columns warn against: they quit their jobs before they had anything to show for it, then walked into Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch and started building in public.
Co-founder and CTO. Columbia friend of 6+ years. Wrote code at Twitter and MemAI before turning his attention to fire trucks. The engineer to Hunt's operator.
Appraisals, virtual inspections, instant freight quotes, warranties, financing, and payments - the platform automates the parts of a heavy-equipment sale that usually take months.
Infinity Ventures led the $13.5M Series A. Initialized Capital led the seed. FJ Labs, Benchstrength, Wayfinder Ventures, and Y Combinator came along.
Consider what it takes to move a used fire engine the old way. You find a buyer, somehow, often in another state. You argue about what it is worth, with no shared reference point. You figure out how to haul something the size of a school bus across the country. You hope the payment clears. You pray the paperwork is right. Each step is a place for the deal to die.
Garage collapses that gauntlet into a single flow. The platform runs AI-powered appraisals so both sides start from a real number. It offers both auction and buy-now formats, so a department can list a rig and let the market decide, or a buyer can simply purchase. It generates instant freight quotes and coordinates the delivery logistics for assets that no parcel carrier will touch. It bolts on warranties and financing. And it handles the payments and the paperwork so the transaction is secure on both ends.
The result is that a process measured in months starts to look like one measured in days. For a public-safety agency with a tight budget and a truck sitting idle in a bay, that compression is the entire value proposition. The faster the old asset sells, the sooner its value funds the next one.
Garage connects buyers and sellers anywhere in the country, and creates a more secure, streamlined experience for buying and selling expensive, difficult-to-move assets.
- Martin Hunt, on what the platform doesThe pitch that won over Infinity Ventures, FJ Labs, and the rest was not about fire trucks specifically. Fire trucks are the wedge - a painful, expensive, hard-to-move category where the absence of a marketplace is obvious to anyone who has tried to sell one. Behind the wedge sits the larger prize: the roughly $1 trillion market for municipal and heavy business equipment, an entire economy of essential assets that the consumer internet simply skipped.
Investors backed the round, in Hunt's telling, on a few things at once - the strength of a founder who lived the problem, the scale of the market, demonstrated demand, and revenue growth that proved real product-market fit rather than a clever demo. The $13.5M Series A is earmarked for the unglamorous work of scaling: more engineers, a bigger go-to-market team, and broader reach across the country.
Hunt is candid that bringing on a Series A lead was the hardest decision of the raise. It meant choosing the first outside member of his board - a partner, not just a check. The advice he gives other founders working without infinite capital sounds like something a firefighter would say about a fire: respect the constraint, stay close to the thing that matters, and waste nothing.
Sometimes constraints actually force the best discipline - get closer to your customers, sharpen your business model, and be incredibly deliberate with every dollar.
- Martin Hunt, advice to foundersJoins a Delaware volunteer fire department at 15. Logs 1,500+ training hours, becomes a paid firefighter and EMT for New Castle County.
Hangs up the gear and joins Goldman Sachs as a private-equity associate after Columbia.
A friend's frustration turns into a company. Hunt and Alaz Sengul leave their jobs to found Garage.
Garage joins Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch and raises a $4.5M seed led by Initialized Capital.
Raises a $13.5M Series A led by Infinity Ventures. Total funding hits $18M. The marketplace now operates in all 50 states.
Garage connects buyers and sellers anywhere in the country, and creates a more secure, streamlined experience for buying and selling expensive, difficult-to-move assets.
Sometimes constraints actually force the best discipline - get closer to your customers, sharpen your business model, and be incredibly deliberate with every dollar.
The biggest challenge was choosing the right partner - this was the first time we were bringing an external member onto our board.
I was a firefighter in Delaware and witnessed firsthand how painful it was to manage buying and selling equipment and vehicles.
Hunt frames Garage around a simple idea: keep taxpayer money in the hands of America's cities. When a department can sell its old engine for what it is actually worth, and buy its next one without overpaying, the budget stretches further. The customers are not abstractions. They are places like Burlington, Vermont and South Charleston, West Virginia.
He talks about a "selfless goals" mentality - putting the customer's time, budget, and experience ahead of the company's convenience. It is the kind of line that would sound like a slogan from most founders. From a man who spent years answering emergency calls, it reads more like a habit.
The ambition underneath is large. Garage wants to be the default infrastructure for how essential equipment changes hands in America. The fire trucks are the wedge. The trillion-dollar pile behind them is the destination.