(DJI Mavic Pro drone. Source: Betterview website.)
Betterview, a San Francisco-based provider of a technology platform for drone- and data-based building and property inspections, has announced that Plug and Play Ventures (Sunnyvale, Calif.) has made an investment in the company. Betterview will use the funding to expand its artificial intelligence capabilities to new imagery sources, as well as enhance its property data and analytics platform. The companies declined to share the amount or terms of the funding.
Gijs Dutry van Haeften, Senior Associate, Plug and Play Ventures.
Plug and Play was founded as a venture capital firm and has gone on to develop global startup accelerator programs to improve technological advancement across various industries. Plug and Play has over 70 corporate partners in its Insurtech program including AIG, Axis Capital, EMC, Guidewire, Maiden Re, and Nationwide.
“Our relationship with Betterview goes back to 2016 when they were selected out of 800 startups to be part of our inaugural Insurtech batch,” comments Gijs Dutry van Haeften, Senior Associate, Plug and Play Ventures. “We see a lot of value in the way Betterview has been able to leverage their extensive aerial imagery analysis capabilities and combine them with external data sources to tackle underwriting and loss control in a cost-effective manner.
“Furthermore, recent integrations with systems suppliers such as Guidewire that position Betterview as a full-service workflow management tool are a further testament to the platform that they have built,” Dutry van Haeften adds. “We believe this combination of tools together with the market need for better building and property data in the Property and Casualty space gives rise to a particularly exciting opportunity.”
In July 2018, Betterview released Property Profile, a solution that uses aerial imagery, along with a variety of other data sources, such as historical weather, to determine the characteristics and condition of a roof and the risk of future insurance claims. Betterview reports that it has enhanced Property Profile in the intervening months by adding building permits, new AI roof detections, measurement and annotation tools, and oblique imagery.
David Lyman, Co-Founder, Betterview.
Expanding AI Capabilities
Betterview also recently announced its integration accelerator for Guidewire (Foster City, Calif.) PolicyCenter, which enables underwriters to request and access property data and inspections from within PolicyCenter.
“Our relationship with Plug and Play has been extremely helpful over the past few years,” comments David Lyman, Co-Founder & CEO, Betterview. “We are looking forward to leveraging Plug and Play’s expertise, funding and relationships so we may expand our artificial intelligence capabilities, build out our partner ecosystem and add more functionality to our platform. Our goal is to provide data that allows P&C insurers to take specific actions throughout the insurance lifecycle, from quoting all the way through claims and catastrophe response.”
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