A San Diego startup building AI-powered vehicle inspection software has raised $10 million in a round led by Sheryl Sandberg’s venture fund, with contributions from two former Tesla executives and one of the largest auto lenders in North America.
Self Inspection aims to be the database for all cars — a single, trusted record that follows each vehicle “from the day it leaves the lot to the day it’s resold, refinanced or retired,” the company said in a release announcing the funding late last month.
Founded in 2021, Self Inspection began as a team of physical inspectors, according to CEO Constantine Yaremtso. “We noticed there was a lot of inconsistencies,” he told the Union-Tribune on Tuesday. It’s a significant problem, he said, given how important vehicle condition data is to the industry.
But inconsistent and missing data was only part of the problem. There was no way to reliably track the physical state of a vehicle over time.
So Yaremtso built a platform that helps record a vehicle’s wear and tear when it is purchased, rented, financed, serviced, returned, resold or removed from operation.
In practice, operators, drivers and dealers open the app, take a photo of the vehicle’s damage, for example, and the platform does the rest — identifying damage, producing a standardized condition report and storing an auditable history against the vehicle.
Today, the only auditable history exists as a paper trail.
Prospective used car buyers often look at something like Carfax, an aggregate of insurance filings, inspections, titles and registration records. That document is supposed to show what shape a used car is in, but buyers sometimes end up with incomplete or inaccurate information.
Self Inspection says it solves that by building a structured data platform for vehicle condition. The platform works to standardize how dealers, operators and drivers photograph and report vehicle damage.
The company says it has completed more than 1 million inspections across rental fleets, auto finance companies, auctions and marketplaces. Self Inspection also says that its customers have saved more than 300,000 operational hours and cut costs by more than $80 million so far.
“The biggest technology companies get built by transforming industries that are massive, essential and ready for change,” said Sandberg, the ex-chief operating officer of Facebook. She now runs her own investment firm. “Vehicle condition touches billions of dollars in automotive decisions every year, and the data behind it is still a mess. We think Self Inspection is the team that builds the system of record the industry needs.”
Other Self Inspection backers include Westlake Financial, one of the biggest auto lenders in North America. Costanoa Ventures, Rebellion Ventures and BrightCap Ventures also joined the latest round, alongside earlier backers that include DVx Ventures — founded by former Tesla President Jon McNeill — and Karim Bousta, former vice president of Worldwide Service at Tesla.