Garage raises $41M to sell used fire trucks online, and says sales passed $100M

New York startup Garage, an online marketplace for used municipal heavy equipment, said on November 10 it raised $41 million in a Series B led by Invus Opportunities. The company says annual platform sales have passed $100 million.

Infinity Ventures, Initialized Capital, Y Combinator, Benchstrength and FJ Labs also joined the round, according to the company. Garage put its total funding at $60 million. It said the money will go to hiring and to new heavy-duty categories, including public works and sanitation.

An AI appraiser, freight desk and lender in one platform

Garage describes itself as an AI-powered marketplace for equipment such as fire engines and garbage trucks, sold mostly by local governments and fire departments. The company lists five parts of the service:

• An AI appraisal engine that produces valuations for specialized municipal assets.
• Automated freight quoting and transport coordination, which the company says works without human dispatchers.
• Warranties on pre-owned equipment.
• Financing built around public-sector budgets and purchasing rules.
• Access to a nationwide buyer network. Garage says the average sale travels more than 1,400 miles.

The company says it serves more than 1,000 communities in all 50 states and in Canada. It claims about 400% year-over-year growth and says it has helped municipalities capture more than $100 million in value, through higher resale prices and cheaper purchases. An Invus partner, Bryan Kim, said in the release that Garage reached $100 million in sales with no logistics employees.

Garage’s pitch is a price gap. It says a new fire truck can cost up to $2 million, while a used one on its platform runs about $150,000, a cut of more than 90%. The release backs this with local examples, among them Auburn, Massachusetts, which says it sold a truck for $120,000 after never getting more than $10,000 through traditional channels. CEO Martin Hunt, a former firefighter and EMT who worked at Goldman Sachs, framed it in terms of local budgets:

“An extra million dollars has a real impact on a community.”

Used trucks are in demand because new ones are scarce

The angle here is the market in numbers. The International Association of Fire Fighters, a union that has lobbied on the issue, puts the price of a new engine at about $589,000 in 2020 and close to $1.1 million in 2025, with ladder trucks reaching about $2 million. Delivery times have stretched from roughly 18 months to two to four years, and sometimes longer, according to FireRescue1’s reporting on Massachusetts departments.

Market concentration adds pressure. A Stateline report says REV Group, Oshkosh (Pierce) and Rosenbauer account for more than 70% of U.S. fire apparatus production, and that dozens of cities and counties have sued the manufacturers. The lawsuits allege the companies conspired to restrict supply. The manufacturers deny it and say the pandemic drove demand up and disrupted supply chains.

Against that backdrop, Garage’s claim that Utica, Indiana rebuilt a fire fleet in weeks instead of years looks less like a niche story. It shows why a used-equipment market can grow quickly while new-truck queues stay long. Garage’s own growth is not independently verified. Y Combinator’s launch page and press coverage described the company’s earlier funding as about $18 million, including a $13.5 million Series A. That is consistent with the $60 million total once this round is added, though Garage did not break out its earlier rounds in the release.

What the release leaves unproven

How much of the work the AI does is unclear. The release says valuations and freight handling are automated, but it gives no accuracy figures for the appraisal engine and no detail on how appraisals are checked. It also does not say what share of sales Garage keeps, what the warranties cover, who underwrites the financing, or how “platform sales” are counted. The $150,000 versus $2 million comparison sets a decades-old used truck against a new one, so it is not a like-for-like saving. Customer figures such as Duxbury, South Charleston and Skagit County come from the company’s own release.

Buyers and sellers can use the platform now at shopgarage.com, and the company says it covers all 50 states and Canada. The new categories, public works and sanitation, have no stated launch dates. For municipal buyers, the practical change is a national listing with freight and financing handled in one place, replacing local auctions that Garage says often fetched little more than scrap value. Whether the $41 million is enough to repeat that outside fire trucks is what the next year of sales should show.