The Pista Story

Built in a Garage, Not a Boardroom

I never set out to build software. I set out to fix cars.

For years I ran MotoroCars, an independent auto-repair business with two shops in Miami: one in Wynwood, one in Doral. Real bays, real lifts, real customers waiting in the lobby wondering when their car would be ready. If you have ever run a shop, you know the feeling. The work in the bay is the easy part. It is everything around it that grinds you down.

The Patchwork

Here is what running my shops actually looked like.

One system to write the repair order. A separate parts portal (sometimes three or four) to find a part and check a price. A different tool for labor times that never quite matched what the job really took. A phone system that lived in its own world, disconnected from any of it. Texting customers from a personal cell. Chasing approvals. Re-keying the same VIN, the same name, the same job into screen after screen.

Every one of those tools sent me an invoice. Tekmetric. ShopMonkey. The parts platforms. The phones. I was paying premium prices for a stack of products that did not talk to each other, and the cost of stitching them together was paid in my time, my service advisors' time, and the trust of customers who just wanted a straight answer about their car.

The market made it worse, not better. The software category around me kept consolidating into the hands of private equity and strategic giants. Shop-Ware was acquired by Vehlo. Mitchell 1 sits inside Snap-on. Tekmetric took growth equity from Susquehanna. These were not companies hungry to feel a shop owner's daily pain. They were portfolios. And the independent shop, around 300,000 of us in this country running on roughly 89 billion dollars of repair revenue, was the customer being managed, not served.

The Idea, Born From Frustration

The idea was simple, and it came out of pure exhaustion: what if one system ran the whole shop?

Not another point tool to add to the pile. One place where the repair order, the parts sourcing, the labor times, the customer texts, the phone calls, the payments, and the financing all lived together, and where the boring, repetitive work got handled by AI instead of by a tired human at 6 p.m.

I had the unfair advantage almost no software founder has: I owned the test lab. My own shops. So I started building it for MotoroCars first.

Building It Where the Work Happens

We wired it to real labor-time data so the hours on a ticket reflected the actual job, not a guess. We pulled parts sourcing into one search instead of a dozen logins. We brought the phone system in. We let customers pay the way they actually want to pay, card, Apple Pay, and financing through partners like Affirm, right from the repair order. And we gave the whole thing a voice, because a shop is a human place and the software should not feel like a spreadsheet with a login.

Every feature had to survive the only review that matters: a real workday in Wynwood and Doral. If it did not save my advisors time or make a customer's experience better, it did not ship. That discipline is why this is not a demo. It is the system my own business runs on.

From MotoroCars to Pista

What we built for ourselves turned out to be the thing every shop owner I talked to was quietly desperate for. So we gave it a name of its own: Pista.

Pista is one AI-driven system to run the entire shop. Front desk to back bay, first call to final payment. It was built by a shop owner who lived the problem, for shop owners who are living it right now. Not by a boardroom optimizing a portfolio.

I am proud that Pista did not arrive as a slide deck with a clever roadmap. It arrived as working software with a real, revenue-generating shop running on it every single day.

The Mission

Independent shops are the backbone of how this country keeps moving, and they have been handed expensive, disconnected tools by people who never turned a wrench. We are building Pista to change that.

Our mission is simple, and it is the same promise we make to every car that rolls into the bay: keep every shop on the road.

— Felix, Founder, Pista