Levi Fawcett

As a student, Levi Fawcett constructed a caravan from scratch to create his own university accommodation.

Before he graduated, he’d founded four businesses. He then took a gamble on a start-up called Rocket Lab, building the rockets’ navigation system while completing his engineering degree during evenings and weekends.

Leaving what was by then a household name to self-fund a new business was a huge risk – and Levi’s next venture fizzled out. He could have given up at that point, but his passion for cars sparked the idea for something new.

Finding the right second-hand car part was a challenge, simply because sellers had no visibility of where to find stock. For buyers, there was no certainty that the part they were getting would actually fit their car. For the cars, that frequently spelled an early death, sent to the scrapyard because the parts were too hard to get.

Levi set out to create a solution that would revolutionise the industry, an accurate, accessible global database for sellers that would automatically match cars to the right parts.

The result, Partly, is now one of New Zealand’s fastest-growing start-ups.

“I've said from day one; this is an extremely difficult problem, and the odds of failure are high. Our mission has always been to connect the world's parts by making it really easy for buyers to find the right parts, and we've now passed one of the most significant milestones in getting there,” Levi explains.

Within three years, Partly has grown to more than 50 employees, raised New Zealand’s largest ever Series A funding – $37 million – and expanded into Europe and Australia.

Levi is driven by a passion for social impact and making the system greener. Partly reduces the need to send away for parts by sourcing ones closer to home, and minimises returns by ensuring parts are the right ones.

“Changing the way we approach repairs can dramatically reduce our impact on the environment. I want to accelerate the world towards a sustainable future where waste is eliminated and all replacement parts are universally searchable, accessible and available to all,” he says.