Sheryl Sandberg backs smartphone-based car inspection startup with $10 million

Sheryl Sandberg is putting her money behind a new kind of vehicle inspection — one that runs entirely off a smartphone camera. Her family office, Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners, led a $10 million investment round into Self Inspection, a San Diego startup that also counts former Tesla president Jon McNeill’s DVx Ventures among its backers.

Founded in 2021, Self Inspection has already processed over 1 million vehicle inspections for rental fleets, finance companies, auctions and online marketplaces. Stellantis’ financial arm uses the platform for corporate-owned vehicles and lease-end checks. The company’s pitch is refreshingly simple: send a link to anyone with a smartphone, guide them through photographing the car, then use AI trained on a massive dataset of damaged vehicles to detect dents, scratches and other issues. Within minutes, the software generates a detailed PDF report — complete with labor costs, parts needed and repair estimates — that rivals what a body shop would produce.

“Vehicle condition touches billions of dollars in automotive decisions every year, yet the data remains fragmented,” Sandberg said in a statement. “That is changing. We believe Self Inspection will build the system of record that the automotive industry needs.” Other investors in the round include tire distributor U.S. AutoForce, automotive lender Westlake Financial, and early-stage funds Costanoa Ventures, Rebellion Ventures and BrightCap Ventures.

Self Inspection says its platform has already saved customers more than $80 million and eliminated over 300,000 hours of manual inspection work. CEO Constantine Yaremtso noted the company can also pull data from a car’s OBD2 computer for even deeper analysis. The new funds will go toward building more products, landing larger enterprise clients, and expanding into Europe. Self Inspection isn’t alone in using AI to shake up the auto industry — startups like Toma and Flai focus on dealership voice agents, and UVeye takes a hardware-heavy approach — but the simplicity of a smartphone-based system gives it a distinct edge.