PARTLY will establish an Australian engineering team following a successful A$71 million capital raising, with the New Zealand-founded automotive AI specialist saying Australia is set to play a key role in developing software for the global vehicle repair industry.

Partly co-founder and chief executive officer Levi Fawcett told GoAuto News Premium Australia offers the right mix of technical talent and geographic reach to support the company’s next phase of growth.

Levi Fawcett

The business is now recruiting locally, with plans to establish a Sydney-based product engineering team to complement its existing New Zealand operation.

Mr Fawcett said the company was seeking to fill core technical positions, including software engineers, machine learning engineers, and data scientists.

“These are the people who actually build and train the model to meet the needs of our customers in the repair sector,” he said.

Mr Fawcett rejected the view that Australia’s exit from vehicle manufacturing signalled the end of its importance to the automotive industry.

“I don’t think that’s right,” he said.

“The repair and aftermarket side of the industry is enormous, it employs a huge number of people, and it’s not going anywhere.

“Cars are getting more complex, the average vehicle on the road is around 14 years old, and workshops are turning work away because the administration and complexity have become overwhelming.

“What we can do from here is build the AI infrastructure that makes this industry genuinely more productive.

“A domain-specific model built in Australia and New Zealand can serve repairers in the US, the UK, and the Nordics.

“You don’t need to build the cars to build the technology that the world’s repair industry runs on. That is where I see Australia playing a critical role in the automotive sector’s future.”

Mr Fawcett said automotive technology talent was far more widely distributed than many people assumed.

“The best engineers and product people don’t all live in Silicon Valley,” he added.

“Australia and New Zealand are home to exactly the kind of technical and AI talent we want building the future of automotive repair, and we can attract them here far more easily than by competing on someone else’s turf overseas.

“New Zealand is our engineering and APAC base, and Australia is becoming an increasingly important part of that regional engine.”

Mr Fawcett said the latest capital raising would allow Partly to further invest in local talent and attract the country’s best engineers.

“This lets us invest further in that talent locally to attract the best people in the country to come and build the future of the global parts industry with us,” he continued.

Partly, which was founded in New Zealand and now operates globally, says it has developed the world’s only AI foundation model purpose-built for the automotive parts sector.

The company is the creator of the Interpreter AI model for the automotive repair supply chain and has just completed an A$71 million Series B capital raising led by DST Global, the investor behind Meta, Alibaba, Airbnb, and Anthropic.

The Australian recruitment drive forms part of what Mr Fawcett described as a standout year for the business, which is on track to more than double its global headcount.

“Not since the creation of the assembly line or EVs has the auto industry experienced significant innovation that simultaneously improves operational efficiency, industry profitability, and consumer value,” he stated.

“We have spent five years building the AI infrastructure layer that the industry has been missing. The model architecture is extremely nuanced. There’s a reason general models don’t solve it, and why we’ve been able to lead the frontier of AI in this sector.”