Moncton automotive technology company Selectbidder last week secured its first customer in the United States, Space Coast Auto Auction of Melbourne, Fla., after recently launching its new platform.

The company said getting its latest auction partner is validation for its new business model.

Selectbidder is a web and mobile app that helps accelerate and simplify the process of auctioning off automobiles when they are traded in.

“The pain that we solve is that if the dealer takes in a trade-in they don’t want, the sales process to be long and complicated,” said co-founder and CEO Sean Liptay.

The Liptay family has been involved in auto trade-ins for decades, and Sean is an expert in the process of reselling a used car. After the auto is traded in at a dealership, an independent party called an auction conducts bidding among dealerships to get the best price for the car. The auction has to send photos of the car to a range of dealerships, then arrange the transfer and delivery.

About four years ago, Liptay envisaged an electronic platform that could replace a lot of the functions of the auction so the sales process could be conducted online. He took Selectbidder through the first cohort of what’s now the Propel ICT accelerator and enjoyed some success. In 2013, he raised some funding, including a $200,000 investment from the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation.

But his team, which now amounts to 10 people, realized they would do better working with auctions as clients rather than trying to replace them. So the new platform is a tool that auctions can use to conduct their sales.

Selectbidder lets a selling dealer post pictures of the car along with a quick condition report and send a notification to select dealers in the auto auction’s network. Dealers then bid on the vehicle in real time, allowing them to know the true market value of the vehicle. The selling dealer can also show this to the person trading in the car during negotiations so the customer knows they are getting a fair deal.

“Auctions continue to do what they do best — connect buyers and sellers — while dealers know the true value of a trade-in and consumers feel treated fairly,” said Liptay.

Selectbidder has been working on a pilot project with a Canadian client, and securing Space Coast Auto gives the startup a second customer.

Liptay said he is working on rolling it out across the network of 400 auto auctions across North America.

“The beauty of what we’re doing is we can be inserted into any market in North America because (the auctions) already have the existing network.”