Cars are a magical technology — in many ways the democratization of transportation. I spent years building a business, Hailo, making them even easier to access and enjoy. Afterwards, I tried to get back into the hobbies a decade long stint of startups had put on the back burner — among them building and flying R/C planes. In 2015, I couldn’t find anyone doing this anymore. Everyone was flying drones.
So I tried it out. To me they were embryonic robots that happened to fly. I became convinced drones would give us wings in the same way as cars gave us wheels. But to get there, something was missing. The inflection point for cars wasn’t mass-market production, it was mass-market, affordable, insurance.
We take it for granted today but a world in which you face unlimited personal liability for getting behind the wheel is essentially the world drones are flying in today. It’s hard to drive innovation and commercialization in an atmosphere of fear. This is why — along with Eugene, who deftly helped build and sell e-commerce giant Quidsi (diapers.com) to Amazon — we started Verifly.
The trouble with insurance is that product innovation is scarce. The industry relies largely on dated distribution models and, in many cases, government regulation, to sell products people feel they have no choice but to buy differentiated only on price. We saw the growth of drones — a new insurance category — as our opportunity to build a new kind of insurance product that people would actually want to use.
Drones are a new kind of activity and a new kind of risk. Drone users want to buy insurance like anything else — instantly on their smartphone, as and when they need it. Commercial users want to be able to arrive on a client site, purchase coverage for a specific area and period, show their insurance certificate to the client, and start flying. Recreational users want to see the risks around them, get an instant price, and either purchase and fly or use that information to go somewhere else, somewhere cheaper, less risky.
Enter Verifly. We deliver on-demand drone insurance for recreational and commercial users. The policies we arrange start at $10 an hour for $1,000,000 of liability coverage and $10,000 of unintentional invasion of privacy protection. We have made it as easy to purchase a policy as it is to hail a car — all you need is a smartphone and a credit card. There is no application or approval process. Just a price and restrictions on where coverage is offered (for example, near airports). Verifly works with any drone under 15lbs, and does not require you to nominate which drones are covered.
Verifly launches today in 40 states including California, Florida, Texas, and New Jersey. This represents nearly 80% of drone users. We are on track to offer nationwide coverage by the end of the year. Our first policy was bought yesterday in Massachusetts by Sam Lessin of Slow Ventures, our lead investor:
If you have a drone, whether you fly for fun or for profit, check out Verifly today on the App Store and Google Play.
