Toronto-based Fiix, which provided on-demand car maintenance services through its app, has been acquired by US-based Wrench, which also offers at-home car maintenance services.
“We had over 80,000 high intent customers from all across North America visiting our website looking to book a service, but we could only serve a tiny portion of them by being in Toronto.”
– Zain Manji
Since its founding in 2015, Fiix has served 8,000 customers, received over 500 five-star reviews, and attracted customers like Uber and Car2Go. The company went through Y Combinator’s winter 2017 accelerator; co-founder and CTO Khallil Mangalji has written about how the team used Snapchat to get into the accelerator, get $20,000, and building his startup while fighting cancer. The startup raised $1.9 million in funding in 2017.
In a Medium post, Zain Manji, co-founder and chief operating officer, explained why the company had started considering acquisition since earlier this year.
The company was at a point where it would need a large amount of capital to start opening in new cities and improve its B2C retention. Before its acquisition, Fiix served over 20 cities across Toronto and the Greater Toronto Area, while Manji said the company spent months meeting potential acquirers.
“Engineering is one of our core competencies, which is why we were able to build a significant amount of SEO value for our website from across North America. We had over 80,000 high intent customers from all across North America visiting our website looking to book a service, but we could only serve a tiny portion of them by being in Toronto,” he wrote.
In a past BetaKit article, Mangalji expressed a similar sentiment about the challenge of growing its customer base. “There was a lot of organic traffic initially, but when it became time to grow, we realized that you have to spend money to get customers. I think a lot of businesses learn this early on, but when they do their pricing, they realize that it also costs money to acquire the customer in the first place.”
An American partner could extend the company’s efforts further, said Manji. In his Medium post, Manji didn’t say what’s next for the team.
“We find the team at Wrench exceptional, and love their operational and product capabilities. Most importantly, their ability to execute and push boundaries within the industry is superb,” Manji wrote.
Fiix is a a past winner of Velocity’s pitch competition, and has pitched inside the Dragons’ Den.
