Meet the 27-year-old former firefighter who left Goldman to build a used-truck marketplace that’s now valued at $225 million

Résumé détaillé

Garage raised $41 million to help communities buy used fire trucks and sell surplus equipment to buyers across the country.

Martin Hunt joined the volunteer fire service at 15 in his corner of northern Delaware, just outside Philadelphia. Along with fighting fires, he eventually took on a less glamorous part of keeping a department running: selling its old trucks.

It was a lot harder than it sounds. A department that buys a new engine often needs to sell the one it replaced to help pay for it. However, finding a buyer meant cold-calling departments across the country or sending the truck to a local auction, where a vehicle that another town could use might unfortunately go for scrap.

Last year, the very same engine that carried Hunt to his first fire went up for sale. His hometown department’s board hoped to get $30,000. Instead, it sold within days for $125,000, Hunt said, on the online marketplace he had built with his cofounder, Alaz Sengul.

Their company, Garage, is building a nationwide marketplace for the trucks that keep communities running. It connects departments ready to sell with buyers who can’t afford new equipment or wait years for it to arrive, because a truck one town has replaced can still have a long working life somewhere else.

Now the 27-year-old former firefighter, who later worked in private equity at Goldman Sachs, has raised $41 million to grow it. The Series B, led by Invus Opportunities, values the startup at $225 million and brings its total funding to $60 million, the company told Fortune.

By 2023, Hunt was a private equity investor at Goldman Sachs when a friend from his old fire department reached out. The friend had taken over Hunt’s equipment duties and wanted to know how Hunt had managed to make it look so easy.

Not much had changed since Hunt did the job nearly a decade earlier. Departments still leaned on auctions and word of mouth, and new trucks had only gotten harder to come by. Instead, Hunt said new truck can cost millions of dollars and take years to arrive.

The call got Hunt and Sengul, whom he met through a mutual friend at Columbia University…

So they…

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