Three private funding deals from November 10, with very different ideas of what a good business looks like.
Garage, a marketplace for fire engines
Garage raised a $41 million Series B led by Invus Opportunities, with Infinity Ventures, Initialized Capital, Y Combinator, Benchstrength and FJ Labs joining. It has now raised $60 million in total.
Garage runs an online marketplace for heavy equipment, mainly fire engines and garbage trucks, bought and sold by local governments, fire departments and private operators. The company says it passed $100 million in annual platform sales, growing more than 400% a year, and serves over 1,000 communities in all 50 states and Canada. It calls itself the biggest early source of used fire trucks. New money goes to hiring and to new categories such as public works and sanitation.
The founders fit the story. CEO Martin Hunt was a firefighter and EMT before Goldman Sachs and started Garage in late 2023. CTO Alaz Sengul is a software developer. The pitch is simple: towns sell old trucks badly and buy them badly, and nobody built the listing site. That’s a dull, real problem, which is usually a good sign.
Index Industries, a 50 million dollar seed for a housing token
Index Industries raised a $50 million seed round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with Polychain Capital, Galaxy Ventures and Wintermute Ventures. Fifty million is a very large seed.
The company wants to make US housing a tradable asset class. It built a daily US home price index, the USHP Index, that combines several major housing indices. A token tracking it, USHP, is issued by a separate BVI company and planned on Ethereum in 2026 and Solana in 2027. It’s only offered to eligible non-US persons outside the United States. CEO Josh Rosenthal was president and general partner of Polychain, which is also an investor. Chairman Brian Hardecker founded Longmark and was a principal at Blackstone. The release doesn’t say how the money will be spent.
Investors have tried home-price derivatives before, and liquidity never showed up. The difference here is the crypto distribution channel. Whether that brings real hedgers or just speculators is the open question.
iCareManager, a growth round for care software
iCareManager, a Columbia, Maryland company founded in 2011, took an undisclosed growth investment from Five Elms Capital. Its cloud software handles care planning, medication records, scheduling and billing for providers serving people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, plus assisted living and human services. The money goes to rebuilding the platform, more AI features, sales reach and senior hires.