Meet the 27-year-old former firefighter who left Goldman to build a used-truck marketplace that’s now valued at $225 million
Now the 27-year-old former firefighter, who later worked in private equity at Goldman Sachs, has raised $41 million to grow it.
Key points
- From cold calls to a company By 2023, Hunt was a private equity investor at Goldman Sachs when a friend from his old fire department reached out.
- However, finding a buyer meant cold-calling departments across the country or sending the truck to a local auction, where a vehicle that another town could use might unfortunately go for scrap.
- Sengul had worked as a software engineer at Twitter (now X) and later at the AI note-taking startup Mem, while Hunt knew firsthand what the departments they hoped to serve were up against.
It connects departments ready to sell with buyers who can’t afford new equipment or wait years for it to arrive, because a truck one town has replaced can still have a long working life somewhere else.
The Series B, led by Invus Opportunities, values the startup at $225 million and brings its total funding to $60 million, the company told Fortune.
Additional details
- After joining Y Combinator’s winter 2024 batch, they moved to San Francisco and launched the marketplace early that year.
- “At the end of the day, they’re buying a used trash truck or a used fire truck, and so things do go wrong,” Hunt said.
- South Charleston, West Virginia, budgeted a few hundred thousand dollars from surplus sales in 2025 and instead brought in $1.2 million through Garage, Hunt said.
- The goal, he said, is “an experience that feels a lot more like an Amazon than a Craigslist,” even when the item in the cart weighs tens of thousands of pounds and costs hundreds of thousands of dollars.
- Moving an 80,000-pound truck across the country takes more than a “buy now” button.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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