 Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. 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 and construction and public safety, et cetera. So we're really excited to have our next guest. He's David Lyman, the co-founder and CEO of BetterView. David, great to see you. Thank you. So 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 caught, 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 to be identified. So I assume you work for insurance companies, underwriters, you know, all types of inspectors who need some physical data to validate the condition of the property. 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. Okay, and this is not a new business, right? We've had title reports forever and ever and ever. So how has drone technology, DJI specifically, kind of changed the way you guys operate really opened up new opportunities? Yeah, certainly. So when we started the company 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. And they send inspectors on the interior buildings to identify risks like, you know, is the life safety systems in good shape? Are the sprinkler systems, electrical panels, so on and so forth. But one thing that they were missing in insurance companies kept coming back to them for was better roof data. So 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 losses roof related. Yeah, it's about a hundred billion a year in total losses. So it's- Because leakage? Or I mean, what are like the big losses that come 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. And so 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. So David tried out a few other things like roof poles and giving everyone a ladder, but that seemed like there was, neither one of them really solved the problem very well. So the drone was- It's a classic dirty job, right? People fall off a roof, they fall off a ladder. So that's really a big deal. Yeah, and it's time consuming as well. And then the drone has the ability also to get up there and take a lot of imagery very quickly. So you're getting much greater amount of data to actually analyze. So 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 in 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 followup, but the drone is just a great place to get started. And we actually find that using aerial imagery, even before the drone is an even better place, start there, because that's relatively less expensive. 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. And 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. That's interesting, as 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. So 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. And so, 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 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. So 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 can do more at a time? Is it, 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? So 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. And in that case, it's just, the alternative is getting a cherry picker up there or quite frankly are not looking, right? It's just too expensive to take a look. So 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. So there's, that allows the companies to process claims more quickly and more accurately. And 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. And so that creates this record that if there's ever a conflict in the future, you can de-conflict the situation. And 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 insurers so that they can really understand why a decision was made. So just creating more transparency. Right. So a lot of conversation in the key notes about autonomous operation. So obviously DJI spent a lot of money that 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 pointed at the building and it could figure out what it needs to do from there? Yeah, I mean, absolutely see a future. Like you described, you know, pointed at the building, go fly it. Where we are today is somewhere in between. You know, we started out purely manual flight three years ago. Now we have partially autonomous, partially manual and very quickly getting to fully automated flight. And what that does is just continues to drive down the cost of these inspections which allows them to be done more often. Right, right. So 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. David Lyman from BetterView, enjoy the rest of your show and appreciate your time. Oh, hey, my pleasure. All right, he's David Lyman. I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE from Airworks 2017. Thanks for watching.