February 19, 2025
Investment

UVeye Wins Major Backing From Toyota Investment Arm


Toyota’s investment arm is leading a major funding round for fast-growing UVeye, which produces AI-based drive-through inspection stations it calls an MRI for vehicles, the companies announced Wednesday.

The total $191 million round is being led by Toyota growth fund Woven Capital with participation from UMC Capital and MyBerg along with existing investors W.R. Berkley, Menora Mivtachim and More Investment House for $41million in equity financing. Trinity Capital structured the $150 million debt facility.

“UVeye’s platform will help deepen the connection between automotive service providers and their customers by delivering transparency and actionable insights that modernize the service experience,” said Will Fung, Principal at Woven Capital, in a statement.

With this latest cash infusion UVeye has raised $380.5 million in investment capital since its founding in 2016, and formed strategic partnerships with numerous automakers, dealership groups and used-car auctions, according to CEO and co-founder Amir Hever.

UVeye drive-through inspection stations, can detect exterior, performance, structural, mechanical and tire defects within seconds using a combination of cameras, artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies to examine the vehicle and produce reports on the spot.

The combination of equity and debt will be used to further UVeye’s expansion and grow the company’s relationship with Toyota, according to Hever.

“With Trinity, they offered us the debt so we can continue to fund our systems and continue with our growth, up to $150 million in debt,” explained Hever, in an interview. “We’ll use that debt and debt financing to finance more systems. So we’re talking about more than 1,000 systems that we would like to deploy. Working with Woven, hopefully, we’ll sit in many more Toyota dealers as we work with that as well.”

As evidence of UVeye’s closer relationship with the automaker, “we’re coming to their Certified Equipment Program in 2025 and we’re looking at many other ways to work together,” added Yaron Saghiv, chief marketing officer at UVeye, in an interview.

The program provides dealerships with parts and equipment for their fixed operations, or service departments.

UVeye’s drive-through inspection technology originated as a means of screening vehicles for contraband at border crossings but the company quickly expanded its use for instant quality control inspections at auto assembly plants.

The company has since opened a North American headquarters in Teaneck, N.J. and rapidly expanded availability of its drive-through inspection stations at dealerships and fleets. It also has facilities in Japan and Germany.

During 2022 and early 2023 UVeye announced major programs in the United States involving more than 5,000 dealerships, used-car auctions and fleets that includes commercial agreements with General Motors Co., Volvo Cars USA and used car chain CarMax to introduce UVeye technology to their wholesale networks.

This year the company plans to expand its relationship with Amazon and other commercial fleet operators and install units in additional European location, Hever said.

In addition, UVeye is combining its data with information from automakers to better understand software-defined vehicles and electric vehicles to improve the capabilities of its inspection stations.

Already using artificial intelligence in its inspection systems, UVeye is diving further into the technology.

“We think it can be a really game changer in the merchandising world,” said Hever. “We’re also starting to add more and more Gen AI tools to our condition report, not just to explain the full condition of the vehicle, but also to be able to assess and understand and estimate the cost of the sectors.”

UVeye’s expansion plans come as it faces a challenge from Australian company CMT Scanner. CMT launched its first North American vehicle inspection operation last November with Oklahama City-based Swift Collision, which operates a chain of vehicle reconditioning centers.

A key difference between CMT Scanner’s inspection stations and UVeye’s is CMT’s are designed to detect only exterior flaws, while UVeye’s examine a vehicle inside and out, including tires.

Aside from physical expansion, Hever says the goal is to use technology, combined with data from automakers to better understand vehicles of today and the future to provide more accurate and useful reports.



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