(click) >> Hey, welcome back, everybody, Jeff Rick here with the Cube. We're in Denver, Colorado, at the DJI AirWorks show. It's the second year they've had it, about 600 people talking about commercial applications for drones. It's not consumer, this is not fun, it's not movie making, but really, all the commercial applications, in construction, in public safety, etc. Really excited to have our next guest. He's David Lyman, the Co-founder and CEO of Betterview. David, great to see you. >> Yeah, thank you. >> For people that aren't familiar with Betterview, what's your basic business? >> Yeah, so Betterview is a platform for inspecting buildings and properties using drones. We also pull in other forms of aerial imagery like satellite, aerial imagery captured with manned aircraft. But all of it is to be able to understand the condition of a property, the buildings on it, so that action can be taken on it, risks could be identified. >> I assume you work for insurance companies, underwriters, all types of inspectors who need some physical data to validate the condition of the properties. >> Yeah, that's right, we do both pre-loss and post-loss inspections for the insurance industry. We have a few other customers as well, but that's the bulk of our business. >> OK, then this is not a new business, right? We've had title reports forever and ever and ever. >> David: Yeah. >> How has drone technology, DJI specifically, kind of changed the way you guys operate, really opened up new opportunities? >> Yeah, certainly. When we started the companies three years ago with my co-founder, Dave, he was coming at it from his family's business, which was a commercial inspections business for the insurance industry. They send inspectors in the interior of buildings to identify risks like, is the life safety systems in good shape? Are the sprinkler systems, electrical panels, so on and so forth. But one thing that we're missing, and insurance companies kept coming back to them for, was better roof data. About 30 to 40% of the property losses that are paid out each year by the insurance industry are roof related. >> 30 to 40% of the loss is roof related. >> Yeah, it's about a 100 billion a year in total losses. >> Because leakage, or I mean, what are like the big losses that they don't see? >> I mean, replacing roofs is expensive. But also, you have loss of business, you have loss of contents, and so, yeah, when the roof fails, it creates a really big problem. When there's not enough information on the underwriting side, everyone's kind of taking market risk and they're not able to actually resolve problems before they become catastrophes. >> Jeff: Right. >> David tried out a few other things like roof poles and giving everyone a ladder, but that seemed like that there was, neither one of them really solved the problem very well. >> Because it's a classic dirty job, right? People fall off of roofs, they fall off of ladders. >> David: Absolutely. >> That's like really a big deal. >> Yeah, and it's time consuming as well. Then the drone has the ability, also, to get up there and take a lot of imagery very quickly. You're getting much greater amount of data to actually analyze. >> That's interesting, because some people say, can it get enough resolution? But I suppose on the other side, A, you can shoot a lot, but you can also get under the eaves and places where a physical inspector probably just can't cover every single square inch of the roof. >> Yeah, look, there's always cases where we still need to send an inspector out in a very small percentage of the time as a follow up, but the drone is just a great place to get started. We actually find that using aerial imagery even before the drone is an even better place, start there, because that's relatively less expensive. >> Jeff: Right. >> The drone allows us to get up very close, a few feet off the roof. We can identify small hail and other types of problems. Then if you find something that looks, that you can't quite get a full read on, then send out somebody to get up on the roof, and that ends up being a much smaller percentage of the time. >> Now, it's interesting, because you said you've got a whole portfolio of different visual tools you can use, from satellite to overhead airplane flights to drones to people. It's pretty interesting that you can apply whatever the right application is for the right problem. >> Yeah, certainly. I mean, we haven't always had, we've kind of, over time, added more and more data. We're really there to solve the problem of a lack of data around these buildings and properties. As we've continued along this journey, working with our customers, getting their feedback, we've been able to better solve the problem, and found additional data points that are helpful. But the drone ends up just being, especially as the drone's, the resolution of the imagery gets higher, the collision avoidance sensors allow you to kind of get close but not hit something, all that's really helping the drone be a more and more effective tool with every new release, every year. >> What's the biggest benefit, do you think? Because I can think of, one would be kind of accuracy of the mapping, because, obviously, you have software, you can make sure you cover every space. Is it efficiency that you could do more at a time? What is the biggest benefit of using a drone application in this long time historic business? >> Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, it depends on the situation, right. We have a big insurer of churches called Church Mutual, who, they have some very challenging structures that they inspect, right, so looking at the steeple. In that case, it's just, the alternative is getting a cherry picker up there, or, quite frankly, or not looking, right. It's just too expensive to take a look. That's one example there. When you have a catastrophe scenario, like a hurricane, in Florida recently, with Irma, the benefit is that you can see a lot of properties in the same amount of time that you had. That allows companies to process claims more quickly and more accurately. Then kind of generally speaking, what's great is that we capture such a comprehensive data set. We're getting really up close and we're capturing hundreds if not thousands of images of any property that we go inspect. That creates this record, that if there's ever a conflict in the future, you can deconflict the situation. We're actually trying to get our customers to be more proactive in using all that imagery and offering it up to their customers, the insureds, so that they can really understand why a decision was made. You're just creating more transparency. >> Right. A lot of conversation in the keynotes about autonomous operations. Obviously, DJI spent a lot of money, the things basically fly themselves, you're just telling them where to go. How much of your inspections are done with an operator? Or do you see a future where you basically point it at the building and it could figure out what it needs to do from there? >> Yeah, I mean, I absolutely see a future like you described, point it at the building and go fly it. Where we are today is somewhere in between. We started out purely manual flight three years ago. Now we have partially autonomous, partially manual, and very quickly getting to fully automated flight. What that does is just continues to drive down the cost of these inspections, which allows them to be done more often. The net, kind of where we end up in all of that is, you're just going to see a lot more decision making being data driven over time in the insurance industry and beyond around these buildings and properties than it ever has been before. >> Data driven automated software based decision making, >> Right. >> We see it everywhere. All right, David, well, thanks for stopping by. >> Absolutely. >> David Lyman for Betterview. Enjoy the rest of your show >> Thank you. >> And appreciate your time. >> Oh, hey, my pleasure. Thank you. >> All right, David Lyman. I'm Jeff Rick, you're watching the Cube from Airworks 2017, thanks for watching. (click)