Meet the up-and-coming duo taking the online equipment marketplace by storm: Dan Pinto and Dmitriy Rokhfeld.
L to R: Dan Pinto, cofounder and chief technology officer, and Dmitriy Rohkfeld, cofounder and president
Dan and Dmitriy grew up together in Miami. They started a message board for movies and TV shows in high school, and sold the business before heading off to college. Upon graduation, they worked on websites for different companies. The idea for Machinio came to Dan after he tried helping a friend find a used printing press online. The search ended in failure and frustration, and led him into building technology to crawl the web, aggregate listings, and find what he needed. Dan and Dmitriy reconnected to work on Machinio.com.
How does Machinio.com work?
According to Laura Pereira of the Operations Team, Machinio.com is a global search engine for finding used machinery and equipment. Currently, there are more than one million active used equipment listings, which translates into having more listings than any other website. Machinio works with more than 2,300 equipment dealers from all over the world, a lot of them leaders in the industry, to list their equipment. With that, over 600,000 interested machinery buyers from 190 countries visit Machinio.com each month looking for used machines and heavy equipment. Using proprietary technology, Machinio connects interested buyers with thousands of global sellers that have the equipment they are looking to purchase (over 70,000 leads are sent per month) and helps accelerate the sale of their equipment.
What gap does Machinio fill in the machinery marketplace?
ROKHFELD: Machinio solves one of the biggest pain points that buyers experience every single day: how difficult and time consuming it is find needed equipment. Solving this “information discovery” problem is the reason we founded Machinio back in 2012 and remains the driving force behind our company. We understood that we could leverage technology in a way unheard of in this industry and aggregate millions of listings from thousands of global sellers.
These days not everyone takes the time to pick up the newest magazine, or check out the latest newspaper, as some of the people in the industry might think that is still the way. With the shift moving towards digitalization and online marketplaces, we wanted to combine the quality of the local buyer with a much larger reach, and dealers have embraced technology and what it can do for their businesses. No longer would buyers need to visit dozens or hundreds of different websites to find what they needed, they could start and finish their entire search on Machinio.com. We could do for used machinery what Expedia and Kayak did for hotels and flights. And, if we enabled buyers to more efficiently find what they needed, it would greatly benefit the dealers as well.
How is Machinio bridging the gap between business and technology?
ROKHFELD: Machinio builds tools focused on removing steps in the process for buyers and sellers so they can spend less time messing with technology and more time focused on their core business. For example, our automated alerts help remove many steps for buyers looking for equipment. Buyers sign up for keywords of items they are interested in and receive emails with the exact items they’re looking for as soon as a seller posts those items online. Buyers no longer even need to search in the traditional sense. They can sit back, relax, and wait for their daily email, saving them hours every week. Another example is our vetting process of the leads. We run a multi-step vetting process, to save them time and energy. We flag inappropriate requests before it ever reaches them.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
Machinio was founded in 2012, raised several small rounds from multiple investors and a series A round from Ritchie Bros. back in 2016. In 2018, they remain full force aiming to add a lot of new features, provide more resources, and grow to be the leading machinery marketplace. With an entire team of millennials impacting businesses that have been around much longer than they have, worldwide operations and headquarters in Chicago and in Berlin, Machinio now looks towards establishing teams in the Asian and South American markets. Aside from Machinio.com, they also have Spanish, German, Italian, French, and Japanese versions of the search engine.
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Modern Contractor Solutions, July 2018
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