SelectFI just put another charge into the automotive AI grid, the kind of voltage Buffalo delivers when it decides the industry has been sleepwalking long enough. StartFast Ventures stepped in to lead an undisclosed seed round, and Michael Quigley joined the board with the calm confidence of someone who has seen scale from both the investor chair and the operator’s desk. There is nothing subtle about what this means. When a company that launched in 2023 pulls in new capital while its platform is onboarding dealerships week after week, it signals a shift in who gets to set the pace in dealership tech.
SelectFI was born from a moment most F&I managers know too well. Customers want transparent payments without their credit score taking a beating. Lenders keep updating guidelines like it is a moving target competition. Regulators want every dealership acting like a compliance scholar. Tommy Vullo saw the chaos from inside West Herr Automotive Group and built the Lender Selector concept in 2022 before turning it into SelectFI in May 2023. The platform did not arrive with fireworks. It arrived with accuracy. Soft pull, no SSN. Real approval probability modeling. Tri-bureau analysis for the 1-in-5 customers whose profiles do not match bureau to bureau. All of it designed to give dealers payments they can trust and profit structures they can defend.
What takes this story from spark to ignition is the leadership bench. Andrew Sweet stepped in as CEO with dealership SaaS instincts wired into muscle memory from his years at ACV Auctions. Joe Peacock is scaling the tech like someone who already built a 100+ engineer organization and watched it go public at a $4.8B valuation. CFO Matthew Dorn built the financial framework that helped raise $4.5M in July 2024 on top of the earlier $1.99M note, pushing total capital raised north of $6.49M before the newest round. Growth has not been theoretical. Revenue hit $2M in 2024 and kept climbing at 20%+ monthly through that period, and dealerships across NY, FL, TX, AL and AR lined up because the product removed friction without demanding behavior change.
The advisory board adds another layer of gravity. Devin Daly brings global digital retailing experience. Dan Magnuszewski brings startup-to-IPO engineering perspective. Chris Martinez brings dealership volume intuition from the frontline. Ed Rice brings regulatory precision. Steve Nicosia brings M&A and financial clarity. It is not a hype council. It is an operating system.
Dealers do not need more noise. They need faster approvals, cleaner compliance, stronger margins, and fewer moments where a customer hesitates because they fear a credit inquiry. SelectFI gives them that in one workflow. When a platform can return an approval estimate in about 20 seconds and protect front and back-end performance at the same time, the market tends to speak quickly. SelectFI is listening, scaling, and answering with the kind of momentum that feels less like a pitch and more like a recalibration.
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