DealerCue Automotive Corp., maker of inventory acquisition and management platform VINCUE, has completed a Series B investment round led by global automotive services firm Holman and backed by venture capital firms Autotech Ventures and Automotive Ventures.

The deal represents the first major institutional investments for VINCUE, which the company said enables it to scale operations, advance its product roadmap and meet increasing market demand.

The amount of the funding was not specified.

“Holman is a remarkable organization with an unsurpassed collection of automotive competencies and is held in extremely high regard across the entire industry,” said Chris Hoke, VINCUE’s founder, CEO and chief technology officer.

“We’re thrilled Holman believes in the significant potential of our technology and is at the forefront of this investment in our company. Holman is an innovator in our industry and the organization’s forward-thinking mindset along with its strategic capital investment will help to fuel our company’s continued growth.”

VINCUE co-founder and managing partner Danny Zaslavsky said the company’s collaboration with Holman began as a vendor/ customer relationship – Holman operates more than 30 franchise dealerships in eight states – but both sides realized there were a number of natural synergies.

“As Holman piloted our platform in several of their dealership locations, it quickly became apparent that our technology would help them further optimize operations while also enhancing our own capabilities,” Zaslavsky said. “We’re proud that Holman shares our vision for the future of automotive retailing and we’re honored they’ve invested in our innovative inventory management solution.”

VINCUE’s unified platform offers a comprehensive suite of tools and capabilities designed to manage every step of the inventory lifecycle, including buying plans, multi-channel acquisition sourcing, market pricing and appraisal, merchandising and syndication, and digital marketing.

The goal, the company said, is to help dealers unlock prevailing strategies that increase gross and turn by providing real-time market and competitor data to make better buying and merchandising decisions.

Holman Growth Ventures president and CEO Bill Cariss said VINCUE “fits the profile” for investment as an early-stage business driving innovation in the auto industry.

“The VINCUE team is extremely talented and continues to think differently about inventory lifecycle management,” he said. “Their intuitive platform is poised to disrupt the status quo of the retail automotive sector and offers dealerships a solution that empowers insightful decision-making.”

As part of its investment in VINCUE, Holman said it will integrate VINCUE’s technology into more of its locations to introduce new operational processes and procedures.

“Through our initial use of VINCUE’s technology, we believe it provides the data intelligence and tools necessary to make impactful decisions, measure success and, ultimately, outperform the rest of the market in real time,” Holman vice president of retail operations Chris Morgan said.

Autotech Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm with more than $500 million under management that seeks to solve the world’s ground transport challenges with technology.

“Automotive as a whole has largely been left out of the digital transformation happening in other retail industries, often relying on lagging indicators for buying and selling decisions from legacy software tools built decades ago,” Autotech venture partner Tony Rimas said. “VINCUE offers modern solutions built on real-time data and intelligence to help dealers outperform the market instead of race to the bottom of it.”

Led by founder and CEO Steve Greenfield, Automotive Ventures promotes itself as funding the next wave of innovation in transportation technology. Its leadership team includes industry pioneer Chip Perry as an operating partner.

“We know the industry and the market is changing,” Greenfield said. “VINCUE is doing something about it.”

Hoke called the investors’ commitment to his company “humbling” and said VINCUE’s priorities are now growing its performance management and development teams and investing in operational improvements to get more done, faster.

“We have the benefit now of dealerships seeking us out in the industry, wanting to understand how we can help them win,” he said. “So right now it’s about how we scale, grow and meet their expectations.”