In a Barcelona repair workshop, a mechanic looking for a used bumper or a working alternator has historically faced a choice between calling around to a dozen scrapyards or ordering a new part at several times the price. Recomotor, a Spanish startup founded in 2021, is trying to collapse that workflow into a single search box and a tracked delivery, and it has spent the past two years rebuilding itself around the harder half of that promise: the logistics behind the click.
The company began as an online dealer of secondhand car parts covering all major brands, with a six-month warranty attached to every order [EU-Startups]. Underneath the storefront sits software that connects scrapyards on one side with workshops and dealers on the other, automating what used to be a phone-and-fax negotiation [Intelectium]. Co-founders Jan Amat and Gerard Palau pitched it early as a marketplace, but trade press covering the company has described a deliberate shift from listings to logistics, with Recomotor taking on more of the fulfillment stack itself rather than leaving it to the yards [Auto Recycling World].
The bet
Recomotor's wager is that the bottleneck in the European used-parts market is not demand. Workshops want cheaper components and insurers increasingly want repair estimates that include recycled parts. The bottleneck is trust and timing: a body shop cannot wait three days to find out whether a yard in another province actually has the door panel its catalog claims, and in the right condition. By standing in the middle as the operator of both the software and a coordinated delivery flow, Recomotor is betting it can offer something closer to a distributor's reliability on top of a salvage-yard cost base. The Catalonia startup hub describes the company as focused on the digitisation and automation of automotive parts distribution, recovering parts sustainably and economically from professionals across the network [catalonia.com].
That positioning matters because the competitive set is not empty. Lithuania's Ovoko has built one of the larger pan-European marketplaces for used auto parts, and any Spanish entrant has to explain why a vertically coordinated, locally dense model beats a broader cross-border listings business. Recomotor's answer, judging from its public posture, is depth over breadth: own the operational layer in one geography first, then export it.
Why it could be big
The tailwinds are real. The European Union's circular-economy agenda has pushed automotive recycling up the policy stack, and insurers across Western Europe are under pressure to lower claim costs as repair inflation continues. A reliable supply of certified used parts, delivered next-day to a workshop with a warranty, sits squarely in that intersection. If Recomotor can become the default rail by which Spanish (and eventually Iberian) scrapyards reach professional buyers, the addressable spend is substantial: every collision repair, every out-of-warranty engine swap, every fleet maintenance line item is a candidate transaction.
The cap table reflects investors who tend to back operationally heavy Iberian businesses rather than pure software plays. Recomotor's roughly $2.03 million seed was led by Barlon Capital and included Othman Ktiri (the founder of mobility group OK Mobility), Enrique Seligrat, Rene de Jong, and Hugo Arevalo [Nordic 9] [CB Insights]. That mix of a financial lead and operator angels with mobility and Iberian scaling experience is the kind of syndicate that tends to be patient with logistics gross margins in year one and demanding about unit economics by year three.
Seed round (Sept 2022) | 2.03 | $M
Total disclosed funding | 2.03 | $M
The team and traction
Jan Amat is chief executive and co-founder, a role he has continued to represent publicly, including at a Startup Grind event in Mataró where he was billed as CEO and co-founder of Recomotor [Startup Grind]. Gerard Palau co-founded the company alongside him, and the two have been profiled together as the operating duo behind the business [LinkedIn]. The company is headquartered in Barcelona and operates under the legal entity JG Recomotor SL [infoempresa.com]. Trade coverage of its move from listings into logistics suggests the team has been willing to take on the less glamorous work of routing, quality control, and yard onboarding rather than staying purely in software [Auto Recycling World].
The honest counterfactual
The bear case is straightforward. Marketplaces in fragmented physical-goods categories are notoriously hard to scale: liquidity is local, quality is variable, and the unit economics of delivering a single used bumper across a country can erode quickly without dense route planning. Ovoko's broader European footprint gives it a head start on selection, and a workshop comparing two catalogs may simply pick whichever has the part in stock that hour. The bull answer, supported by the company's own strategic shift, is that Recomotor is not trying to win on catalog size. It is trying to win on the experience a professional buyer gets when the order actually has to arrive on a specific morning so a car can be returned to its owner that afternoon [Auto Recycling World]. If that operational layer is genuinely proprietary, and if the software lock-in with scrapyards deepens, the moat looks less like a marketplace and more like a regional distributor with better margins.
What to watch
The next twelve months should clarify two things. The first is geographic: whether Recomotor extends meaningfully beyond its Spanish base into Portugal, France, or Italy, which would test whether the playbook travels. The second is commercial: whether the company signs framework agreements with insurers or large multi-site workshop chains, the kind of contracts that turn a marketplace into infrastructure. A Series A would be the natural vehicle to fund either move, and given the September 2022 seed [Nordic 9] [CB Insights], the timing for a follow-on conversation is plausible. Watch, too, for any disclosure on the share of orders Recomotor now fulfills directly versus passes through to yards. That ratio, more than any headline revenue figure, will tell you whether the listings-to-logistics pivot is actually compounding.
For a sector that has spent decades running on phone calls and handshake quality control, a credible digital rail with a warranty attached is not a small thing. Whether Recomotor becomes that rail for Western Europe, or one of two or three regional players that share it, is the question its next round will have to answer.
Pulse Raman, Health and Bio Correspondent, Startuply. (Filing off-beat this week; the patient here is the repair shop waiting on a part.)