New York just got louder in the marketplace game, and it’s not Wall Street yelling over bond spreads, it’s Garage raising a $13.5 million Series A to redefine how essential equipment moves across America. The name says it all. For decades, fire departments, municipalities, and public safety crews have been forced to run their procurement like a yard sale on Facebook, hoping the right buyer showed up before the rust did. Now Martin Hunt and Alaz Sengul have turned that broken process into a platform where a fire truck doesn’t sit idle in a parking lot, it gets valued, listed, financed, shipped, and put back to work, all with a few clicks.
This isn’t an app for side hustlers hawking lawnmowers. Fire trucks cost up to $2.5 million new, and used rigs can trade hands at $50,000 to $1 million. Every inefficiency in that process isn’t just wasted time, it’s taxpayer money burning. Martin Hunt saw it firsthand. At 15, he was already clocking 1,500 hours in the Delaware fire service, earning EMT stripes, later pulling shifts as a volunteer and paid firefighter. He carried that experience to Columbia, layered in private equity chops at Goldman Sachs, and came back with the insight that public safety deserved better tools. That’s where Alaz Sengul, Columbia classmate turned CTO, comes in. After engineering stints at Twitter and Mem, Sengul brought the code to match Hunt’s grit, building an AI-powered system that turns days of bureaucratic haggling into seconds of certainty.
The Series A was led by Infinity Ventures, joined by Initialized Capital, Benchstrength, Wayfinder Ventures, and FJ Labs. Infinity Ventures knows marketplaces and fintech cold, and co-founder Mario Ruiz didn’t mince words: Garage is solving an underserved demand with precision. Initialized saw it early, backing the $4.5 million seed after Garage ran through Y Combinator’s Winter 2024 cohort. Add FJ Labs, the heavyweight that’s bet on over 1,200 marketplaces, and you’ve got a syndicate that doesn’t just fund trends, they create them.
Garage is already live in all 50 states. Municipalities from Burlington, Virginia, to South Charleston, West Virginia, are moving equipment through the platform, tapping AI appraisal tools that instantly price assets, secure payments that protect six-figure deals, and freight coordination that can haul a ladder truck across state lines without a hitch. Better Business Bureau accreditation and FDIC sponsorship aren’t badges on a pitch deck, they’re the trust signals that let public agencies know their budgets are safe.
And the runway is wide. Today it’s fire and EMS, but the same inefficiencies plague construction, agriculture, and government surplus. When transactions run north of $100,000, the stakes demand a marketplace that can guarantee speed, accuracy, and security. That’s Garage’s edge. The $13.5 million raise isn’t just fuel, it’s a signal that industries still running procurement like it’s the 1980s are about to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into the modern era.
