The Collision Industry Electronic Commerce Association (CIECA) announced that Dents.co has joined the association as a corporate member.

Jonathan Pyle founded the company in 2020 with the vision to build tools for the collision repair industry that would increase trust between industry stakeholders by providing transparency to the estimating and repair process.

Dents.co’s flagship product is a mobile app designed to measure body panel damage using artificial intelligence (AI) dent detection, paired with geometric algorithms powered by depth data from camera sensors.

“We created the app to help reduce friction negotiating repair times and help repairs get underway more quickly,” said Pyle. “We recognized the need for this additional data while operating shops over the past several years.

Pyle said the increasing trend of remote collaboration between estimators and adjusters begged for the ability to share the scale of the damage with more detail than a photo alone can provide.

Pyle has known about CIECA for many years and was a previous member through the MSO that he and his partners sold early last year.

“We joined CIECA because we believe in its mission and understand the importance of communication standards when developing software for the industry,” he said.

Pyle and his team are excited about CIECA’s work building out API messages.

“We believe standards are important for the industry because they promote the ability for businesses to utilize their data,” he said. “Harnessing this data, shops can provide greater customer service, get repairs done quickly, and most importantly, ensure repairs are done safely and correctly for the customer. Without standards-based data sharing, these kinds of seamless integrations would not be possible or, at the very least, would be much more difficult.”