Problem

Garage addresses a fragmented, slow, and costly market for buying and selling specialized vehicles and equipment. Fire departments, municipalities, and other public-safety organizations have traditionally relied on local auctions, Facebook groups, word of mouth, and separate brokers or logistics providers. That limits the buyer pool, creates fraud and coordination risk, and makes it difficult for budget-constrained agencies to find suitable equipment or recover capital from underused assets.

The killer use case is a department replacing an apparatus and needing to sell the old one while another department searches for an affordable replacement. The economics are significant: a new fire truck can cost roughly $1.5 million to $2.5 million, while used trucks range from about $50,000 to $1 million. Garage is designed to help a seller unlock that residual value and help a buyer acquire critical equipment that might otherwise be outside its budget.

Product / Service

Garage is a nationwide, AI-powered B2B marketplace for specialized vehicles and equipment, initially focused on fire apparatus and expanding into ambulances, rescue equipment, heavy machinery, and government surplus. It automates or coordinates the transaction workflow, including appraisals, virtual inspections, paperwork, payment processing, freight, financing, and—where applicable—warranty options. Buyers can discover equipment across the country rather than searching only within a local network, while sellers can list assets for free and receive nationwide marketing.

The company’s value proposition is an end-to-end transaction that compresses a process that once took months or days into minutes and reduces the need to coordinate multiple vendors. Garage’s terms state that it earns a 10% platform or success fee on transactions, unless a different arrangement is agreed with the seller; additional listing or promotion fees may also apply.

Market

Garage competes in the vertical B2B marketplace and transaction-infrastructure market for municipal, public-safety, and heavy business equipment. Management describes the broader opportunity as a $1 trillion municipal and heavy-business-equipment market, with public-safety vehicles as the initial wedge. Its direct and adjacent alternatives include local auctions, Facebook groups, newspaper classifieds, traditional brokers, and online auction marketplaces such as GovDeals. Garage differentiates itself from auction-only platforms by combining nationwide discovery with freight, payments, financing, appraisals, inspections, and other parts of the transaction in one workflow.

The company is operating and has meaningful early traction rather than being pre-revenue. In its August 2025 Series A announcement, Garage said local governments, fire departments, and small businesses were using the platform in all 50 states and that equipment purchased through it served millions of Americans; the founders also described early traction, strong revenue growth, and product-market fit. Garage raised $13.5 million in that Series A, bringing total capital raised to $18 million, with backing from Infinity Ventures, Y Combinator, Initialized Capital, Benchstrength, Wayfinder Ventures, and FJ Labs. Public materials do not provide a marketplace GMV or revenue figure, so scale beyond geographic adoption and the company’s reported growth claims remains undisclosed.