Roof Restore Made Straightforward: A Former Marine Raises $60 Million For An App That Delivers Quick Measurements

Three insurance coverage giants teamed as much as spend money on Hover, a startup that makes use of a 3D-imaging cell-phone app to hurry up and scale back the price of roof repairs.

Vacationers Insurance coverage, State Farm Ventures and Nationwide led the $60 million Collection D financing spherical for the corporate, which may create detailed roof measurements from only a few smartphone photographs.

Hover was based in 2011 by A.J. Altman, a former U.S. Marine infantry officer. It targets each householders and professionals, with the majority of its income coming from contractors and insurance coverage firms, who historically must ship out a crew to evaluate a broken roof for restore.

“These insurance coverage carriers could be coping with a number of hundred thousand exterior claims a yr on a constructing,” says Hover CEO Altman. “These numbers add up.”

Jim Wucherpfennig, a vice chairman at Vacationers, says his firm began utilizing Hover to raised course of claims. “There’s actually two vital attributes, the primary being accuracy, and the second being pace. The measurements that the platform offers us are nearly as good or higher than our greatest declare skilled that we’ve.”

Hover has a tiered pricing mannequin. Householders can take footage free of charge, whereas business shoppers might pay wherever from $20 to $200 for a single job, to $2,500 or extra per yr for bulk use. The corporate is on tempo to generate $70 million in income over the 12 months, nonetheless a small slice of the reported $45 billion roofing contracting market. 

Altman hopes to spice up gross sales partly by increasing Hover’s e-commerce division. Already, clients can scan a roof, decide the estimated value of restore and order provides all by way of the Hover platform. “We’ve integrations with two of the highest three distributors in North America,” he says.

Previous to founding Hover, Altman labored as an engineer at Intel, then frolicked consulting for the Division of Protection earlier than becoming a member of the Marines.

“After I acquired out of the Marine Corps in 2009, I moved again to the Bay Space… and was in a form of discovery mode,” he says. Whereas speaking to another engineers, he discovered about “3D math and photogrammetry.” The iPhone was taking off, and thru experimentation Altman found residence repairs as the best marriage of each applied sciences.

“I did not understand how huge the market was,” he says. By luck, the idea “had killer product-market match and exploded, and [it] has grown exponentially ever since.”