Sheryl Sandberg leads $10M round for Self Inspection

Sheryl Sandberg has led a $10 million investment into Self Inspection, a San Diego-based startup building an AI-powered vehicle inspection platform, through her family office, Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners. The round also includes DVx Ventures, the venture firm founded by former Tesla president Jon McNeill.

“The biggest technology companies are built by transforming industries that are massive, essential, and ready for change. Vehicle condition touches billions of dollars in automotive decisions every year, yet the data remains fragmented. That is changing. We believe Self Inspection will build the system of record that the automotive industry needs,” Sandberg said.

Strategic and early-stage investors in the round include:

• U.S. AutoForce, a tire distributor
• Westlake Financial, an automotive lender
• Costanoa Ventures
• Rebellion Ventures
• BrightCap Ventures

Founded in 2021, Self Inspection has completed more than 1 million vehicle inspections for clients including rental fleets, automotive finance companies, auctions, and marketplaces. Stellantis, the automotive manufacturing group, uses the platform through its financial services arm for corporate-owned vehicles and lease-end inspections. Self Inspection said its platform has helped customers reduce costs by over $80 million and save more than 300,000 operational hours.

Self Inspection is one of several startups applying AI to automotive tasks: Toma and Flai deploy voice agents to improve dealership communication, and BidBus lets dealerships bid on privately-owned cars. UVeye takes a hardware-based, infrastructure-level approach to vehicle inspections, but Self Inspection’s pitch rests on simplicity — its software lets anyone with a smartphone upload photos of a car, guiding them to cover the whole vehicle. CEO Constantine Yaremtso has said the approach leans on the fact that people already have decent cameras and know how to capture photos. Those images are then compared against what the company describes as a large dataset of damaged vehicles to detect damage and severity, producing a detailed repair report and cost estimate of the kind normally issued by a body shop, with data from a car’s OBD2 computer adding further detail.

Self Inspection plans to use the new funding to build more products, reach more enterprise customers, and expand to Europe.

Why it matters

Self Inspection is positioning itself as the system of record for an automotive industry where vehicle-condition data remains fragmented despite its scale, and the $10 million round led by Sandberg’s family office gives it capital to pursue that role through new enterprise deals and an expansion into Europe.