Q3 Tweener Founder Spotlight: Shift Automotive
Where software meets grease: building the future of auto repair from inside the garage.
Tweener Founder Spotlights
For those new to the series: Tweener Founder Spotlights highlight the people behind the Triangle’s most interesting early-stage companies: how they got here, what they’re building, and what they’ve learned along the way. We look for the story beneath the story: the inflection points, motivations, and lived experiences that shape a founder’s path.
For this Spotlight, we sat down with Tristin, Sweeney co-founder of Shift Automotive, a startup modernizing the independent auto repair industry.
Shift Automotive builds automation and workflow software for auto repair shops, streamlining the repetitive, manual tasks that slow service advisors, technicians, and owners down. What makes Tristin’s perspective unique, and the company’s product unusually grounded, is that he doesn’t just build software for this industry. He runs a repair shop himself in Cary.
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Modernizing the trades, one repair shop workflow at a time.
Lessons You’ll Hear Between the Lines
Shift Automotive spans both the shop floor and the software stack. Here’s the short version:
Build from lived experience, not assumptions: Tristin doesn’t just understand repair shop workflows, he runs one. That gives Shift an unusually clear view of where automation genuinely helps and where it doesn’t.
The trades are a massive, overlooked frontier for innovation: Auto repair, welding, HVAC, plumbing, these industries aren’t going anywhere, and they’re full of legacy processes ready for modern solutions.
Finding product-market fit means following the pain, not the plan: Listening to owners, observing real workflows, and watching what truly drives adoption led to the pivot that unlocked immediate traction.
Community isn’t networking, it’s insulation: Staying connected to other founders, students, and entrepreneurship programs isn’t transactional. It’s how you stay grounded, share the load, and solve problems faster.
From Startup Software to Owning a Shop and Back Again
The origin story of Shift Automotive starts with something unusual for a SaaS founder: grease-stained hands.
Tristin’s background is in startup software, specifically building tools for auto repair workflows. After helping an early-stage company exit successfully, he did something most software people don’t, he opened his own auto repair shop in Cary.
Tristin’s shop, Honest Automotive
Owning the shop wasn’t a side project. It became the missing data point.
“I combined my experience building software for repair shops with my lived experience actually running one,” he explains. “Once I validated that the pain points I was feeling were shared broadly across the industry, we knew we were onto something.”
He reconnected with an old colleague Saim Raza, and his two childhood friends Adeel Asghar and Nabeel Asghar who had been toying around with a few ideas in the automotive space. Together they began building software to automate the repetitive, time-consuming tasks that bog down repair shops every day.
Where They Started and the Early Pivot That Changed Everything
The first product was designed for technicians: a tool to quickly access diagnostic information. Technicians liked it, but not enough to change deeply entrenched workflows.
“It was helpful,” Tristin says, “but the pain wasn’t painful enough to drive behavioral change.”
So the team zoomed out. What does every shop care about, no matter their size?
Revenue and efficiency.
More specifically: accurately recommending manufacturer-required services based on mileage and service history. Today, most service advisors do this manually by digging through Carfax reports, cross-checking OEM schedules, and bouncing between screens. It’s tedious, mistake-prone, and easy to skip.
Shift Automotive turned the entire process into automation. Click once. See what the manufacturer says the car needs. Recommend it. Move on.
“We found the easiest wedge into the workflow was helping shops increase their average repair order, in a way that’s transparent and genuinely needed,” Tristin says. “That’s when things clicked.”
When they launched publically at ASTA, a major automotive conference in Raleigh, demos began converting on the first call. Real product-market fit had arrived.
Saim and Tristin attend The Automotive Service & Tire Alliance conference (ASTA)
What They Learned the Hard Way
This is Tristin’s seventh time around the startup block, so most lessons were learned in previous lives. But one thing still surprised him: Fundraising is 60% network, 30% team, and 10% everything else.
“There are companies that are amazing, that are doing really cool things, that struggle to raise money because of the inability to get the right introductions,” he says. “And there are mediocre ones that raise easily because they know the right people and have the right connections.”
For Shift Automotive, their key wasn’t geography, it was order of operations. They began their raise outside the region, where they had dozens of conversations that led to a strong lead. Once that was secured, conversations everywhere, including in the Triangle, moved faster. With clear validation in place, local funds could plug in more quickly and confidently.
“Once we had our lead, everything streamlined. The conversations were smoother, and it allowed us to focus on fit, not friction.”
(For the record, Tweener joined during this period, over what began as a casual coffee with Scot.)
Tristin working at his shop, Honest Automotive
The bigger lesson? Sometimes you don’t need every door open, just the first one. Many founders assume fundraising is a linear, uphill path, but Tristin’s experience reinforces a more universal truth:
Don’t wait for perfect timing or perfect access. Use your network, start where you can get traction, and let that traction expand your opportunities.
The Community Thread: Why Founders Need Each Other
If there’s one thing Tristin emphasizes, it’s this: founders need community not for networking, but for survival.
“It’s isolating,” he says. “Your friends don’t get it. Your partner or family may not get it. Working insane hours while everyone else seems to be living normal lives, it wears on you.”
Being in a room of people who understand the pressure makes all the difference.
He also believes in the “just say yes” approach to community: speaking on panels, helping student founders, participating in Tweener Night, supporting NC State Entrepreneurship, making introductions, offering advice.
None of it seems immediately useful. But all of it builds the foundation of reciprocal support.
“When the time comes that you do need help, people want to show up,” he says. “It feels like a two-way street, not a transaction.”
What’s Next for Shift Automotive
Shift Automotive is now fully in go-to-market mode.
They just returned from SEMA, one of the largest trade show in the world, and are traveling continuously to training conferences and automotive events to meet shop owners, gather feedback, and showcase their platform.
Early traction has been strong. Feedback has been even stronger.
“We’re releasing functionality nobody else is building, at a pace that delights customers,” Tristin says. “And every event gives us new insight into what shop owners really need.”
Expect more shops adopting the platform, more automated workflows replacing manual busywork, and more founders realizing that the trades are a goldmine of innovation waiting to be unlocked.
The Shift team at SEMA
Final Word
What stayed with us long after this conversation wasn’t just their technology and platform, it was Tristin’s perspective on the future of work.
“There’s enormous opportunity in industries that tech has ignored,” he says. “Auto repair isn’t going anywhere. Neither are electricians, welders, plumbers, HVAC techs. These industries are full of legacy processes, retiring owners, and huge operational gaps.”
He calls it finding interest in the uninteresting. The belief that some of the most meaningful innovation will come from founders willing to look past the shiny, oversaturated corners of tech and into the essential industries that quietly keep the world running. Founders who do that will find massive, underserved markets with real problems and customers eager for modern tools.
Shift Automotive isn’t trying to reinvent auto repair, they’re helping repair shops work smarter, more efficiently, and more sustainably for the next generation. And they’re doing it by standing exactly where the pain lives: in the bays, behind the counters, and inside the day-to-day workflows of real shops.
It’s a grounded kind of innovation. A practical kind. A community-minded kind. Exactly the kind of founder journey we love spotlighting. Find Tristin and co-founders Adeel Asghar, Nabeel Asghar and Saim Raza on LinkedIn, and explore Shift Automotive at https://www.shift-automotive.io
Explore more Tweener portfolio companies at tweenerfund.com.
Next on Tweener Founder Spotlights
Our region is full of builders pushing their industries forward. Up next, we’ll spotlight another founder making an impact right here in the Triangle. Stay tuned for more Tweener Spotlights!