GhostRuck / Zirx / others
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
This record covers consumer on-demand services startups. Zirx, founded in San Francisco in 2013, ran an on-demand valet parking and car services app for consumers, later adding enterprise fleet services. Ghostruck, a Seattle startup that graduated from the 9Mile Labs incubator in 2014, matched people needing moves with professional movers through an app, offering fixed prices for apartment moves or single-item hauls.
02 / GhostRuck / Zirx / others FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
Zirx's consumer on-demand parking proved uneconomical: the company said in February 2016 that the business was very difficult to scale and even harder to scale to profitability, shutting the consumer service on February 29, 2016 to focus on enterprise clients. Ghostruck ran into regulatory trouble: in February 2017 Washington state transportation regulators proposed penalties of up to $730,000 against it for operating as a household-goods carrier without the required permits, identifying 146 instances of unpermitted moving work.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Operations ended
company states it will close all operations effective immediately after state regulators reclassified it as a mover rather than a technology broker and it could not comply with traditional mover rules. WA SOS records show Ghostruck Inc. dissolved/terminated 30 May 2017. GeekWire (1 Jun 2017) covered UTC permit penalties.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
Zirx shut down its consumer on-demand parking service on February 29, 2016, shifting resources to its enterprise fleet-services business.
- 02
Its remaining venture funding, over $36.4 million raised from investors including Bessemer Venture Partners, Norwest Venture Partners and BMW i Ventures, rolled into the enterprise company, which rebranded as Stratim in November 2017.
- 03
Stratim sold itself to KAR Auction Services in February 2018; terms of the deal were not disclosed.
- 04
Beyond the proposed $730,000 in regulatory penalties, no public record quantifies Ghostruck's final financial outcome.