The pitch for WheelPrice is easy to understand if you have ever tried to buy a used set of rare wheels: it should not be this hard, and it should not feel this risky.
Kyle Mayers and Walid "Wally" Namane met at the University of Connecticut, where, by their own telling, they bonded over a shared love of cars and a pair of older red BMW coupes. The frustration came later. Buying and selling enthusiast wheels — the JDM sets, the rare European forged wheels, the collector pieces that change hands for thousands of dollars — meant digging through forums, chasing ghosted direct messages, and trusting listings with no specs and few photos. The two reconnected after college and decided to build the thing they wished existed.
That thing is WheelPrice: a Charlotte-based online marketplace, web and mobile app, where car enthusiasts buy, sell, and auction wheels with buyer-and-seller protection built in. The company describes itself plainly as the wheel marketplace for enthusiasts. The model is borrowed openly from proven platforms. "We took a page out of proven businesses' playbooks and just applied it to a space that was dramatically underserved," Mayers told the startup news outlet GrepBeat in May 2025.
How it works, and how it makes money
The mechanics are familiar to anyone who has used a resale platform. Sellers list wheels with photos and a price; buyers place a bid, make an offer, or buy outright; the wheels ship with a prepaid label or change hands locally. Listings are sortable by the specifications that matter to wheel buyers — diameter, width, manufacturer.
The business takes roughly 10 percent of every completed sale, split as a 7 percent seller fee and a 3 percent buyer fee, according to GrepBeat's reporting. It also brokers commercial shipping rates for heavy and international orders and resells that service at a markup, sells advertising on the site, and monetizes a large social media following. Mayers has put that following at more than 250,000 across platforms.
The funding question
WheelPrice's funding history is harder to pin down than its model, and the company's own framing is the most reliable: bootstrapped. WheelPrice went through the Techstars Atlanta accelerator in 2023 and has since taken part in NC IDEA, LaunchCLT, and the Yale Black Venture Summit, and it was a 2023 and 2024 NC IDEA grant recipient. Startup databases list small capital figures — $20,000, $150,000 — but those are accelerator and grant amounts, not a priced venture round, and they do not agree with one another. GrepBeat, reporting in May 2025, listed the company as bootstrapped with a team of five. No disclosed venture round has been reported.
The founding date carries a similar ambiguity. The company's mobile app traces back to roughly 2018 or 2019, but most current accounts — including GrepBeat's — date the company to 2023, which appears to be when the present operating entity took shape around the Techstars cohort.
Why the industry is paying attention
What separates WheelPrice from a well-built classifieds page is a piece of software it launched in January 2025: an AI-powered fitment assistant that it, and the Specialty Equipment Market Association, describe as the automotive industry's first. The problem it solves is real and specific. Figuring out whether a given set of wheels will actually fit a given car has historically taken enthusiasts weeks or months of cross-referencing; WheelPrice's tool lets a user ask the question in plain language and get an answer in real time. "We leveraged AI to simplify that process," Mayers told GrepBeat. The company has also published a beta "WheelPrice Index" that charts price trends for specific wheel models over time.
The credibility shows up in the names attached to the company. WheelPrice's homepage lists endorsements from figures across the enthusiast world, including Craig Donnelly, president of BBS of America — the North American arm of the German wheel manufacturer BBS — and Mike Burroughs, founder of the influential build community StanceWorks. SEMA, the aftermarket industry's trade body, has featured Mayers in a member spotlight and publicized the company's fitment tool. In March 2025, WheelPrice won the audience vote in the "Marketplaces and Platform Innovation" category at the Council for Entrepreneurial Development's Venture Connect summit.
That BBS connection turned into a Charlotte moment of its own this spring, when WheelPrice's founders were given the stage to preview BBS's first-ever truck and SUV wheel at a NASCAR Sundays event.
The bigger ambition
WheelPrice frames used wheels as a roughly $5 billion niche and the broader automobile aftermarket as a $100 billion market — and it has said it wants the larger one. "We want to become not only the world's go-to marketplace for used wheels, we want to be the go-to place for car enthusiasts to buy and sell in any automobile aftermarket," Mayers told GrepBeat.
For now, the company is a five-person, bootstrapped startup that has spent three years building credibility in a corner of the car world that did not have a trustworthy place to do business. Whether it expands into the rest of the aftermarket is the open question. The wheels came first.