Wednesday, March 13, 2019

Startup Provides Bird’s-Eye View of Properties for Underwriters

You might call entrepreneur Ryan Kottenstette a fortune teller. That’s because he can tell how deep learning and computer vision can spot hidden opportunities for traditional industries. His latest startup, Cape Analytics, applies deep convolutional neural nets to geospatial imagery to extract detailed real estate insights for insurers.

It’s safe to say the former venture capitalist is probably onto something. Alongside others at Khosla Ventures, he applied this investment thesis to harvest monster returns from companies such as Blue River Technology, Climate Corporation and Skybox Imaging, which were acquired by John Deere, Monsanto and Google, respectively.