InsurTech startup Betterview has raised a $4.5 million investment, with three carriers participating in the financing.

Nationwide Ventures, EMC Insurance and Maiden Re took part in the Series A round, according to the financing announcement. Venture capital firm Compound also participated, and the VC outfit ManchesterStory led the round.

Nationwide disclosed earlier in May that it had made a strategic investment in Betterview, whose machine learning platform is designed to help perform commercial and residential property assessments for P/C insurers and reinsurers. The technology helps capture and analyze data from drones, satellite and other aerial imagery.

David Lyman, Betterview’s CEO and co-founder, said in prepared remarks that the money is already being put to use with expanding hiring in areas including its data science team.

Lyman and technology/insurance entrepreneur Dave Tobias founded Betterview in 2014, with an initial focus on developing a drone-based property inspection platform and service. The company noted in 2017 that its focus expanded as it began building a new risk management platform for customers looking for a quicker and cheaper way to get an overview of buildings and properties. That same year, Betterview disclosed raising a bit over $2 million in seed financing from the likes of Maiden Re, 645 Ventures, Arab Angel, Winklevoss Capital, Chestnut Street Ventures, Pierre Valade and Edward Lando, with earlier investors Haystack and MetaProp also participating.

In July 2018, Betterview launched its risk management platform, which relies on machine learning, computer vision and geospatial data to deliver data, analysis and insights on commercial and residential properties throughout the United States.

Betterview’s property data is accessible both via application programming interface and user interface. The company said its risk scoring has been proven to be highly correlated to property losses so that carriers can seamlessly disqualify properties that don’t meet their standards, fast-track ones that exceed their standards and manage risk around the ones that fall in between.

As part of the new financing, Betterview also appointed Brian Desmond, CMO, Guidewire Software to its board of directors. Dave Miles, managing partner of ManchesterStory, joined the board as well.

Source: Betterview