Every car dealership knows the small courtroom drama. A customer points to a scratched rim, a nicked door or a fresh-looking dent and says it happened here. The dealership remembers things differently. There are no witnesses worth calling, only two sincere versions of yesterday and a service lane getting more uncomfortable by the minute. Yaron Saghiv likes this scene because it makes the value of complicated machinery wonderfully plain. Let the car drive through a scanner. Photograph the evidence. Put a time on it. The argument suddenly has less oxygen.
Saghiv is the Chief Marketing Officer of UVeye, a company that builds drive-through inspection systems using cameras, computer vision and machine learning. The hardware can look underneath a vehicle, examine tires and capture the exterior. Its software flags possible damage or mechanical concerns and returns a visual report in seconds. The company often calls the result an “MRI for cars,” the sort of phrase a marketer treasures because it can cross a crowded convention floor without losing its luggage.
Yet the more revealing phrase in Saghiv’s vocabulary is much less polished: “It’s just complete transparency.” For an executive charged with explaining artificial intelligence, he spends remarkably little time asking people to admire artificial intelligence. His public case is built around ordinary annoyances - slow inspections, inconsistent judgment, missed tire wear, disputed damage, service recommendations a customer may not trust. The machine matters because the output can be seen.
“With our systems, you just drive through and within about 20 seconds, you get a text with photos of any problems.”Yaron Saghiv
First, sell the gathering
Automotive technology was not Saghiv’s first arena. His early career looks like a collection assembled by someone curious about how communities form online. He established an internet department for the Israeli football club Bnei Yehuda Tel Aviv. He later co-founded Kvrt - The Student Hive, a social and file-sharing platform for university students. Another venture, CompareMe.net, tried to help people make social-consumer decisions.
Then came Funzing, a marketplace for local talks and experiences. Saghiv co-founded the company in 2014 and moved to London as it expanded. Funzing operated across 22 cities in the UK, Singapore and Israel, offering a stage to people willing to turn a hobby, skill or peculiar enthusiasm into an event. Beer Yoga became one of its more shareable creations. Saghiv later wrote that the idea reached more than 113 million views, an internet outcome so excessive it sounds like the exercise itself: improbable until someone posts photographic proof.
The point was never merely to list events. A marketplace needs both hosts and guests, supply and attention, confidence and curiosity. Saghiv worked on the machinery of demand: online and offline marketing, content, partnerships and public relations. At Culture Trip, where he became VP Consumer, he worked on the company’s community and the launch of bookable experiences. At Jolt.io, he taught sessions on growth hacking, lead generation, performance campaigns and customer engagement.
It is tempting to divide this history neatly: B2C before, B2B after. Saghiv himself has written about switching between the two. But the connective tissue is stronger than the labels. A marketplace persuades a stranger to try a new experience. An inspection platform persuades a dealership to change a physical routine and a customer to believe a recommendation. In both cases, the product succeeds only when a person understands what happens next.
The scanner needs a translator
Saghiv joined UVeye as Vice President of Marketing in 2019 and became CMO in 2020. The company had begun in 2016 with undercarriage scanners developed for security inspection. It expanded into automotive quality control, where the same broad premise - cameras notice what a hurried person may miss - could travel from factories and ports to auction lots, rental fleets and dealership service lanes.
The products acquired mythological names. Helios looks beneath the vehicle. Artemis examines tires. Atlas captures a 360-degree exterior view. But Saghiv’s strongest explanations remain grounded in the service advisor’s desk and the customer’s phone. Images make a recommendation inspectable. A worn tire is no longer a line item delivered on professional authority alone. A customer can see the concern, ask another person, or decide with a more useful kind of skepticism.
That shared record has commercial value without requiring theatrical salesmanship. Dealers can document loaner cars before and after use. Fleets can spot recurring issues without tying up a vehicle for a long manual check. Manufacturers and port operators can create consistent records at different points in a vehicle’s journey. UVeye’s partnerships and deployments have involved names including General Motors, Volvo, Toyota, Hyundai, Amazon, CarMax and Hertz. Saghiv’s role is not to invent the models inspecting the pixels. It is to make each workflow legible to the person deciding whether the system belongs there.
“If anything, what it does, it just puts real safety hazards and issues in the hands of the consumer in real time.”Yaron Saghiv
Adoption has no autopilot
Saghiv is unusually candid about the distance between installing AI and using it well. “A lot of it really has to do with adoption,” he said in 2026. Good technology is insufficient if employees are not aligned, trained and accountable to a sound process. The product must be visual, intuitive and available where the work occurs - on a touchscreen in the lane, at an advisor’s desk, or on a phone or tablet beside the customer.
This is a sober way to talk about a fashionable technology. AI can perform a task consistently, but consistency is not the same as organizational change. Advisors need to know how to introduce the report. Managers need to decide what a flag means. Incentives need to reward useful behavior rather than the mere presence of a screen. A system that detects tire wear has accomplished a technical task. A dealership that uses the image to have a clear, non-coercive conversation has accomplished the human one.
Where the value becomes visible · editorial model
The lesson is portable beyond dealerships. Many AI products are sold as intelligence and experienced as interruption. Saghiv reverses the emphasis. Start with the repeated, subjective job. Fit the tool into the existing path. Return an output that a non-expert can inspect. Train the people around it. The algorithm may be proprietary, but adoption is stubbornly public.
New Jersey, in person
The same practical instinct shaped a larger decision. As UVeye grew in the United States, Saghiv moved with his family from Israel to northern New Jersey. Remote work had become normal, but he believed relationships, hiring and company culture could not be transmitted entirely through video calls. “It’s very hard to give your real kind of legacy and passion from Zoom calls,” he said, particularly when local employees also need to understand the market.
The move placed him near UVeye’s American operation and about half an hour from New York City. It also made his work more literal. A piece of enterprise software can be demonstrated remotely. A vehicle inspection system occupies concrete, interrupts traffic and changes how several employees spend their day. To understand why it works, or why it does not, someone eventually has to stand beside the arch.
In New Jersey, he also joined the East Coast extension of G-CMO, a community of Israeli marketing leaders he helped establish in Israel. His endorsement is charmingly immodest: “The best community in the world which emphasizes how Israeli startup culture is second to none.” For a career spent building marketplaces and growth engines, the persistence of community is not decorative. It is a method. New categories spread through peers who can compare notes, introduce customers and explain what the polished materials leave out.
The useful future is ordinary
Saghiv’s recent work has widened the frame from single inspections to the life of a vehicle. Inspection data can support warranty decisions, fleet maintenance, rental-car defleeting, remarketing and future service outreach. A scan is no longer only a moment of diagnosis. It can become part of a continuing record, with all the responsibility that record-keeping implies.
He is careful, however, to bring the argument back to visible utility. A dealer has fewer technicians and needs a consistent first look. A rental operator needs to know when damage appeared. A customer wants to understand why a repair is being recommended. An automaker needs comparable quality checks at several locations. The technology becomes important by making these ordinary decisions faster and less foggy.
There is a glamorous version of automotive AI, full of vehicles gliding through immaculate cities without apparent human inconvenience. Saghiv works in the fluorescent version. It measures tread. It catches a leak. It photographs a rim. It sends a link. It asks the advisor to explain what appears on the screen. This future will not star in many films, but it may prevent a great number of bad afternoons.
That may be the cleanest summary of his career. From student networks to experience marketplaces, from London to Tel Aviv to Tenafly, he has kept returning to the same commercial puzzle: how do you get people to participate in something unfamiliar? At UVeye, the answer begins with a car moving at walking speed through a camera arch. Then the pictures arrive. The room gets quieter. Proof, unlike persuasion, does not need to raise its voice.