Last month, FM Capital completed a follow-on, secondary share purchase six months after first investing in Impel because, “When we first invested in Impel, we believed they were one of the companies best positioned to lead the next phase of automotive AI.”

On Tuesday, FM Capital used similar reasoning and made a strategic investment in DLRdmv, a title and registration platform built for automotive dealerships.

“Every dealer, fleet, and finance company in our network has run into this same headache,” FM Capital managing partner Mark Norman said in a news release. “Get the fee wrong or the paperwork wrong and it costs you real time and real money on every deal.

“We invested in DLRdmv because they’ve actually solved it, and they back it up with people who pick up the phone,” Norman continued.

The resources from FM Capital builds on the investment by Apax Digital Funds last year.

“We backed DLRdmv because it is a category leader in one of the largest unsolved workflow problems in automotive retail — and because the team has built its business the hard way, dealer by dealer, on service and accuracy,” Apax Digital principal Jesse Bendit said in the news release. “Bringing FM Capital and its network of dealer-operators alongside us is a natural next step.

“The people who feel this problem every day now have a direct hand in solving it,” Bendit added.

What is the problem?

When the fee calculation is short, DLRdmv said the dealer typically absorbs it.

When paperwork is wrong, DLRdmv said a deal stalls.

When a title application is rejected, DLRdmv said someone must track down a buyer who drove away weeks ago.

“Multiplied across a dealer group with hundreds of rooftops and thousands of transactions a year, the exposure adds up to a material and largely invisible cost,” DLRdmv said.

From its AccuFee calculator to its DLR50 50-state processing platform and licensed in-state eTitling products, DLRdmv is designed to give dealerships the tools to improve their title and registration workflow around the way they already operate.

DLRdmv is a licensed eTitling provider in Florida, Georgia, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and California and serves more than 5,000 dealerships nationwide via integrations with more than 20 dealer management systems.

The FM Capital investment extends that position by bringing the operators who run some of the country’s largest dealer groups, fleets, and remarketing operations directly into the product roadmap.

The firm invests exclusively in automotive technology. FM Capital’s investor base includes more than 50 leading dealer groups, fleet operators, and remarketing companies — including Holman — across the United States and Canada.

“For 10 years, we’ve built DLRdmv by listening to dealers,” DLRdmv co-founder and CEO Johnson Berry said. “FM Capital brings together many of the industry’s most sophisticated operators, giving us a rare opportunity to build the future of title and registration alongside the people who depend on it every day.

“Title and registration is one of the most consequential and least-supported parts of the deal process in automotive retail. We built DLRdmv around a ‘dealers-first’ philosophy, and this partnership is what that looks like in practice,” Berry went on to say.