auto-parts
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The 30-Year-Old Startup Selling You a Fender Before the Body Shop Can
Three decades in, the online auto-parts seller is betting a rebuilt AI catalog, a revived JC Whitney brand, and a $35.7 million cash infusion can turn cheap fenders into durable margins.
Turn5 Built a Car-Parts Empire One Obsession at a Time
The Pennsylvania retailer turned a teenage garage experiment into a portfolio of specialist stores. Its real product is confidence: the fitment data, how-to media and human advice that help enthusiasts click "buy" on a complicated build.
The Parts Company Racing the Calendar Under Your Hood
WAI Global built a worldwide aftermarket business around a stubbornly practical promise: get a new, application-correct electrical part onto the shelf before a broken vehicle turns into a stranded customer.
The Gulf Coast Chain That Sells 15 Badges Under One Name
One Toyota store in Bradenton became 20-plus rooftops and 15 badges. Here is how a Florida family kept buying dealerships while national groups consolidated the rest.
Alephee
Alephee is an Argentine cloud platform that helps automotive aftermarket brands, wholesalers and distributors sell parts online across Latin America. It standardizes fragmented product catalogs, adds vehicle-fitment data, keeps prices and inventory in sync, and connects the entire distribution chain to marketplaces like Mercado Libre and Amazon so an offline reseller network can be replicated online.
Zack Kanter
Zack Kanter is the founder and CEO of Stedi, an API-first, cloud-native healthcare clearinghouse that routes eligibility checks, claims, and electronic payments between providers and insurers. He started his first company at 16, building a bootstrapped auto-parts wholesaler (Proforged) that he ran for roughly 13 years before selling it to Huron Capital. He then spent years wrestling with electronic data interchange (EDI), the arcane plumbing of business-to-business transactions, rewriting Stedi's codebase about eight times before finding extraordinary traction in healthcare. Along the way he became widely read for essays like 'Why Amazon is eating the world.' In March 2026 Stedi raised a $50M Series C led by Addition, bringing total funding to about $142M.
Gluon Solutions, Inc.
Gluon Solutions is a Livermore, California software company building IoT and cloud platforms that quietly run the unglamorous back office of fuel stations, convenience stores, and auto-parts sellers. Its three product lines - Petromo (c-store and fuel-station management), Gluon Auto (vehicle and fleet monitoring), and EZ Lister (auto parts catalog and marketplace listing) - stitch together pumps, tanks, point-of-sale terminals, vehicles, and e-commerce inventories into a single connected system.
Sameer Misson
Sameer Misson is the co-founder and CEO of Gluon Solutions, Inc., a Livermore, California-based enterprise software company building IoT, AI, and cloud platforms for the automotive and fuel ecosystem. Under his leadership, Gluon has developed Petromo (fuel station and convenience store management), Gluon Auto (vehicle and fleet monitoring), and EZ Lister (auto parts catalog and fitment tools), collectively serving 100+ businesses. A serial entrepreneur with roots in his family's automotive parts business (Mission Trading Company / MTC Parts), Misson also holds a J.D. from Golden Gate University and studied computer science at UC Berkeley, combining legal, business, and technical expertise in his work across IoT, blockchain, and SaaS.