collision-repair
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Jerod Guerin Is Building a Collision Empire That Refuses to Sand Off the Names
He went from an Army medic and a wheel-repair route to running a national network of collision shops. His wager is simple: buy respected local operators, keep what made them trusted, and repair the car the way its maker intended.
Earl Johnson Left the Trading Desk to Bet on the Body Shop
After years trading global equities, Earl Johnson IV chose a business where the stakes arrive bent, scraped and personal. His wager: independent collision shops can scale without sanding away the craft, culture and local names that earned trust in the first place.
Nikhil Naikal
Nikhil Naikal is the CEO and co-founder of Kinetic, the automotive infrastructure startup using AI, computer vision, and robotics to automate the calibration and digital repair of modern vehicles. A roboticist with a PhD from UC Berkeley and an MS from Carnegie Mellon — where he was part of the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge-winning Tartan Racing team — Naikal previously founded Mapper.ai (acquired by Velodyne Lidar) and engineered AR software at Flyby Media (acquired by Apple). At Kinetic, he is building a national network of high-throughput digital repair hubs that slash ADAS calibration time from hours to under 15 minutes, backed by $31M in total funding including a $21M Series B led by Menlo Ventures.