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.