#movingpeople meets Click-Ins

#movingpeople is a part of Mobility Business  - a consultancy dedicated to "All Things Mobility", focused on growth.

Hello Eugene, co-founder and Chairman of Click-Ins. What is Click-Ins, and how did it all start?

Click-Ins is a Vehicle Intelligence Platform, utilising generative AI and synthetic data.

Our software runs on any phone or camera device and can detect vehicle anomalies. A scratch, a dent, even a license plate that’s been swapped. We work across insurance, automotive, and homeland security. Our customers include companies like Sixt, Openlane, and others in the US, Europe and across the world. 

Generative AI and synthetic data. Let’s talk more about that. 

We started developing AI models back in 2020, and we very quickly realised that the major challenge would be data acquisition and data labelling. 

To train AI models, vast amounts of curated data, that means organised and categorised data, are required. Real world imaging is challenging and limiting, because they are subject to ownership and GDPR issues, and are expensive, as you constantly chase data of new car models and makes. That is why from day one we bet on synthetic data. 

Back then, people were skeptical about it. The likes of Google and Facebook dismissed synthetic data for AI models and said that “It won’t work, the network will know it’s fake”. But we went our own way. We set up a dedicated team and developed algorithms that helped us fool the AI by making our simulated data look and behave exactly like real data. Today, everyone is trying to repeat our approach using synthetic data. 

And I’ll tell you why it matters: a car in Germany doesn’t look exactly the same as the same car in the US. A German car is clean, mostly black, in good condition. A US car could be dusty and crumpled. So, a model trained on regular cars may not perform well. If you train AI only on live data, it won’t work everywhere. Synthetic data offers high levels of generalisation, by covering a broader range of scenarios, with less data. 

By simulating new scenarios and fine-tuning our models, we can adapt to any market in days or weeks, not months. Today we use a small amount of live data, and the rest is generated synthetically. We are fully GDPR-compliant and we don’t train our models on the customers’ data. It’s not about the quantity of the data - but the quality. 

You pivoted during your journey - tell me about that. 

Click-Ins started in 2014. The idea came while I was sitting with a friend. He had this small parking device where you press a button and pay exactly for the minutes you need. Today it is no big deal, but back then it was innovative. And I thought - why not the same for insurance?

I’ve been in the insurance business since 1991. Started door to door, no car, just me and a notebook. Later in life I had my own international insurance company. So the idea of pay-per-use insurance made total sense to me.

With my co-founder Dmitry, we built a “switch on, switch off” app for insurance. And then, because we knew the industry so well, we added more layers — fraud detection, OCR, document scanning, image recognition. It became this big, all-in-one insurance platform.

Then we raised money - this is 2018 - and our investors told us, guys, you have to focus. They were right. We had built too many modules. So we cut everything down and focused on image analysis. That’s when we started to expand to other industries. We focused on the tech, not the industry.

In which markets do you operate?

In insurance, we work on pre-underwriting vehicle checks, first notice of loss, fraud detection etc. In automotive, we work with rentals, remarketing, and fleet management. And in homeland security, we help identify cars. 

With our technology, cars can be identified not just by their license plates but by their geometry and other significant features. For example, we can tell if a car that was seen in different cameras, at the different time cut, is the same car. True vehicle intelligence.

The reason we can do that - and this is an important point I’d like to stress - is because the platform is based on the ontology of the car. We know everything about the car. Furthermore, we combine this knowledge with AI to reduce the “AI hallucinations”. Our system doesn’t just see a car as pixels - it understands the car as a structure. Today, we can identify more than 130 car parts across 39 body styles. That’s over 5,000 panels.

And one more important thing - we don’t replace people. We’re not trying to get rid of humans. We’re building tools that make people faster and more accurate. Like in medicine - AI can help a doctor, but you still want the doctor there. It’s the same for us. We’re a power multiplier.

Where is Click-Ins today?

Our first big commercial client was Shlomo Sixt. As an investor and early adopter. They believed in us when this was all just an idea, and they had the patience to work through it. Without that, I don’t think we’d be where we are today. I read in your interview with  BaTTeRi about the importance of the identity of the first POC and I couldn’t agree more.

In 2022, we signed Openlane, our first Tier 1 US customer. In 2023, we moved our headquarters to the US and brought in a new CEO while I became Chairman. Today we’re focused mainly on the US and the DACH region, with local teams on the ground.

And what’s the future for Click-Ins?

We just received a US patent for our technology called DamagePrint. It turns every scratch or dent into a unique digital identifier-signature - like a fingerprint for the car. With it, you can trace if a door was replaced, match before-and-after photos, or detect fraud. It’s a game-changer. We’re launching that early 2026. 

And we’ve just announced a new product for insurance companies at ITC in Las Vegas - the first ever vehicle hail solution that works in real time via any smartphone! It automatically recognises the hail dents all over the car, calculates the number of the dents and measures them. This solution provides an instant ROI to the insurers. 

Impressive. Lastly, we spoke about the importance of having your first POC with the right company. Any other insights / advice to fellow founders? 

First - choose your investors wisely. Not all money is good money. We once turned down a $1.5 million VC offer because it didn’t feel right. You want people who share your vision, and who will be there for you not only when things are good, but also when they’re really bad. And there are times when everything is really bad, that’s a part of the entrepreneurial journey. 

And that leads me to my second point - as an entrepreneur, you will hear no a thousand times. You’ll fall, get rejected. Everyone does. The difference is how fast you get up. Like in boxing, everyone falls down, but then you have 9 sec to stand up on your feet. That’s it. Get up fast, every time.

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