Plug and Play Announces Investment in Betterview’s Property Data & Analytics Platform

Betterview, which is quickly becoming the platform essential to every transaction around buildings and properties, announced today that Plug and Play Ventures, one of the most active VCs in Silicon Valley, has made an investment in Betterview.  Terms of the funding were not disclosed. Betterview plans to use the funding to expand its artificial intelligence capabilities to new imagery sources, as well as enhance its property data and analytics platform.   

Headquartered in Silicon Valley, Plug and Play was founded as a VC that went on to develop startup accelerator programs and corporate innovation services around the world to improve technological advancement across various industries. Plug and Play has over 70 corporate partners in their Insurtech program including AIG, Axis Capital, EMC, Guidewire, Maiden Re, and Nationwide to name a few.

“Our relationship with Betterview goes back to 2016 when they were selected out of 800 startups to be part of our inaugural Insurtech batch,” said 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. 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,” said Dutry van Haeften.

In August of 2018, Betterview announced the release of Property Profile, which uses aerial imagery, along with a growing number of other data sources like historical weather, to determine the characteristics and condition of a roof and the risk of future insurance claims. Over the last few months, Betterview has enhanced Property Profile by adding building permits, new AI roof detections, measurement and annotation tools, and oblique imagery.

In addition, Betterview recently announced its integration accelerator for Guidewire 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,” said 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 (e.g. change roof from rcv to acv, order loss control inspection, increase deductible, etc) throughout the insurance lifecycle, from quoting all the way through claims and catastrophe response,” explained Lyman.