kinetic
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Cliff Dinwiddie Put Sales and Marketing on One Scoreboard
After three decades in telecom, Uniti and Kinetic CMO Cliff Dinwiddie has a plain-spoken operating system: share the numbers, start with the customer’s problem, admit when you are wrong, and let AI make the humans more useful.
The Company That Rents the Internet Its Roads - and Just Bought the Traffic Back
Uniti spent a decade as the landlord of a fiber empire. In 2025 it bought its biggest tenant back, and set out to sell strands of glass to the companies building the AI internet.
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.