Black Widow Imaging, a leader in high quality auto imaging, announced in a press release that a St. Louis-based Angel Investor group with an extensive background in the automotive industry purchased the company in October 2022. The new ownership is refocusing the company in becoming the industry standard for vehicle imaging. A number of new and returning leaders have also been named.
As part of the restructuring, Darren Kemper, formerly the COO of Black Widow, has been named president. Kemper brings over 20 years of experience working at both large and small organizations leading engineering, software development, operational and organization projects and programs.
“Our new ownership group has been fantastic to work with and has enabled us to take Black Widow Imaging to a best-in-class offering for our partners,” Kemper said. “Our team is laser-focused on providing our partners with the best image capture solution in the market. Exciting changes are coming from Black Widow Imaging.”
In December, a 14,000-square-foot research and development facility was opened in Indianapolis. The facility will serve as an innovation lab for the growing technology team as they focus on advanced imaging capabilities for current and future partners.
Tom Freiert, co-founder of Black Widow Imaging, returned to the leadership team as senior vice president of sales. Freiert was fundamental to the company’s growth in leading all sales and operations activities. His background and passion for serving clients will be key in building relationships with existing and future partners.
Also rounding out the executive team is Rez Mahboubi as chief financial officer and Chris Dillow as the chief technology officer.
Mahboubi is a corporate development, M&A, private equity and structured finance executive with over 25 years of global experience applying his expertise to add significant value to companies across a wide spectrum of industries and development stages. He has worked at a number of leading global financial institutions such as: GE Capital, JP Morgan and Cox Enterprises.
Dillow has been with Black Widow Imaging for over two years and ensures its information systems continue to scale with the company’s rapid growth. He has over 30 years of experience in designing hardware and software as well as holding leadership roles such as CTO for ADESA, where he was instrumental in bringing ADESA’s inventory to the cloud. With the renewed company focus and the new R&D facility as his office, Dillow has the ability to advance the Black Widow system in ways he never could before, according to the release. The results are being realized with a new system update just around the corner.
“Black Widow Imaging has certainly seen a lot of changes in the last few months, however, the energy and excitement among the team is a clear sign the future looks bright,” said Kemper. “Clients never missed a beat in capturing their inventory during the change-over and continue to utilize the automated system that delivers consistent, high-quality images in seconds.” Black Widow is focused on serving the auto auction industry and will soon be advancing their automated drive-thru imaging system with new technology releases.
