By Natalie Szymanski
BUFFALO — When Dan Magnuszewski talks about how he helped build ACV Auctions, he describes it as a lesson he wants to repeat on purpose.
“We built ACV on a problem nobody in Silicon Valley knew existed, and it turned into Buffalo’s first unicorn. That’s the whole model: real problems, real companies, built here,” Mr. Magnuszewski said in a Sept. 9 statement from the 43North Foundation.
Mr. Magnuszewski, who earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University at Buffalo in 2005, according to his biography on UB’s Department of Computer Science and Engineering website, co-founded ACV and served as its chief technology officer. He is now chief executive of Radial Ventures, the venture studio the 43North Foundation created to start new technology companies in Buffalo rather than wait for them to apply.
The timing makes his job more visible. 43North, the startup competition that gave ACV its first $1 million in 2015, held its final Finals on Oct. 8. Copart, the Dallas-based vehicle auction company, completed its purchase of ACV on Oct. 16. And the foundation that grew out of the competition says it will put $100 million to work in Buffalo through 2035.
From UB computer science to “I can build that”
Mr. Magnuszewski’s UB department biography says his career began at M&T Bank, where he worked on network monitoring systems, and continued at Synacor, where he was a developer on the company’s TV Everywhere platform, before he left to freelance with startups and entrepreneurs.
He then ran Z80 Labs, a Buffalo technology incubator. A 2018 ACV announcement of his selection to Buffalo Business First’s “40 Under 40” list said he spent two and a half years there as managing director, mentoring early-stage startups and managing a $5 million venture fund that invested in them. The same release credited him with co-founding Blockchain Buffalo, the CoworkBuffalo coworking space and the first Buffalo Startup Weekend in 2012.
ACV’s origin story, as UB told it in a January 2017 news release, began at Z80 Labs. Co-founder Joe Neiman, a UB School of Management graduate who had sold used cars, walked into the incubator with an idea for bringing technology to the wholesale car market. After hearing it, Mr. Magnuszewski said, “I can build that,” according to the release.
By early 2017 the company had won 43North, raised $6 million more from investors and grown to 52 employees working out of the Thomas R. Beecher Jr. Innovation Center on the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus, UB reported. George Chamoun, a UB graduate and founder of Synacor, had invested and become ACV’s chief executive.
“We have taken a lot of the headache out of the process,” Mr. Magnuszewski told UB at the time. “And by making it more efficient, we are saving sellers and buyers money.”
The release also said he stayed in touch with UB’s computer science department and had hired numerous UB students and interns. In 2016 he received the Outstanding Young Alumnus Award from UB’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, according to the 2018 ACV release, which called the school “his alma mater.” He is listed today on the computer science department’s advisory board.
A unicorn, a public listing and a sale
ACV went on to become what the 43North Foundation calls Buffalo’s first technology unicorn. The foundation says the company went public in 2021 at a valuation of $3.8 billion and has grown to more than 600 local employees.
That chapter closed this month. In an Oct. 16 announcement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Copart said it had completed its acquisition of ACV at $10.50 a share in cash, that ACV stock had stopped trading on the New York Stock Exchange and that ACV would operate as an independent Copart subsidiary led by its existing leadership team. The Buffalo Chronicle examined the merger filings and what they say about Buffalo jobs.
Mr. Magnuszewski’s LinkedIn profile lists him as Radial’s chief executive since September 2024. His UB department page describes a stint as president of Bebop Ventures, a consulting firm focused on building products and scaling technology organizations.
A studio instead of a contest
Radial is the foundation’s answer to a basic question: what replaces a competition that recruited startups from around the world? Instead of judging pitches, the studio generates and tests ideas itself, then pairs them with founders, engineers and designers.
The foundation introduced Radial’s first company in September 2025. It said the studio, led by Mr. Magnuszewski and chief technology officer Mike Canzoneri, debuted early that year and uses a proprietary market-validation tool to rate ideas by the problem, marketability and market size.
“We’ve got many proof points that you can build a successful, scalable tech startup in Buffalo,” Mr. Magnuszewski said in that announcement. “Radial is taking that belief to a new level by building more companies, getting them to the market faster and then supporting them as they scale in Buffalo.”
That first company, Makeoff, uses generative AI to read bid specifications and blueprints and produce estimates for electrical contractors. It was launched by founder Will Zacher with co-founders Cody Bellitto and Morgan Lewis.
“Makeoff takes a process that is expensive, frustrating and risky and makes it intuitive, incredibly accurate and affordable,” Mr. Zacher said in the foundation’s announcement.
In February the foundation said Buffalo Business First had named Makeoff one of five “Startups to Watch” for 2026, citing 60% month-over-month growth and plans to raise seed capital. An August article in Series B(uffalo), a storytelling site run by the 43North Foundation itself, reported that Makeoff had narrowed its focus to electrical contractors with more than $100 million in annual revenue, a market Mr. Zacher estimated at roughly 150 firms in North America, and that projects run through its platform had surfaced about $20 million in potential estimating issues.
“We made a very deliberate decision to focus on enterprise contractors,” Mr. Zacher told Series B(uffalo). “The risk they’re managing is enormous.”
Those figures come from the company and the foundation that created the studio, and the Chronicle could not independently verify them.
Ten companies in the pipeline
In its Sept. 9 announcement, the foundation said Radial has 10 companies in its commercialization pipeline, three of which have begun early sales, and that Makeoff is running three paid enterprise pilots. The same announcement named Colleen E. Heidinger, 43North’s president of nearly seven years, as the foundation’s chief executive effective Jan. 1, 2027, succeeding Sarah Tanbakuchi-Ripa, and set a goal of $5 billion in economic impact for the region over the next decade.
The foundation reports that since 2014, 43North has backed nearly 80 startups that created more than 3,000 jobs, close to 1,000 of them in Western New York, with average wages near $90,000. Those are the foundation’s own numbers. The Chronicle reported last week on how the state-funded competition’s ACV stake became the endowment now paying for this work, and on how little of it is publicly reported.
In the same Sept. 9 statement, Mr. Magnuszewski tied Radial directly to his own path.
“43North gave me the opportunity to scale ACV, and now, as CEO of Radial Ventures, I get to create that same opportunity for the next generation of founders, systematically, not by chance,” he said.
Ms. Heidinger described the stakes for the foundation the same way. “Now we have $100 million to invest, an ambitious goal, and a clear mandate: make Buffalo one of the best places in the country to build a great company,” she said.
Whether a studio can turn out companies more reliably than a contest did will take years to judge. Under its own goals, the test of Mr. Magnuszewski’s second act is whether any of those 10 concepts grows into another ACV.
The Buffalo Chronicle is seeking comment from Mr. Magnuszewski and Radial Ventures through the 43North Foundation. This article will be updated with any response.
Joe Neiman (left) and Dan Magnuszewski, co-founders of ACV Auctions, at the Thomas R. Beecher Jr. Innovation Center in Buffalo in 2017. Photo: Douglas Levere / University at Buffalo.
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