
Flock raises £2.25M for on-demand drone insurance - apolishch
https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/29/flock-raises-2-25m-for-its-on-demand-drone-insurance/
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xevb3k
What is the societal value of adding more (and real-time) data to insurance?

In general, insurance helps spread risk. This means that if something
drastically bad happens we distribute the impact over a larger population
reducing the individual impact.

In the extreme if you perfectly assess risk insurance ceases to have any
value. The insurance costs would perfectly reflect the risk and there would be
no benefit to owning insurance.

My hunch is that this kind of data driven insurance could help people avoid
risky situations. But I’m not sure that’s a given and it seems like there are
many downsides (particularly if the risk is unavoidable).

I’d be interested in perspectives on this.

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supertrope
"My hunch is that this kind of data driven insurance could help people avoid
risky situations." That's the ideal. The cheapest accident to pay for is the
one that doesn't happen.

It's all about aligning incentives. The win-win dynamic is that the insurer
can certify training courses, licensing, product design, etc. Customers can
get discounts for making safer choices.

Selection effects can be more adversarial. e.g. You get dropped after the
first incident. The people who would benefit the most from coverage can't get
it. People with poor credit scores get discriminated against even in the
absence of activity specific bad history.

Obviously as you mentioned perfect discrimination causes the system to break
down. Risky customers can't get covered while safe customers don't buy because
their risk is infinitesimal.

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poof131
Interesting. Just learned recently that the biggest insurance risk with drones
is fires from the batteries, during flight and during storage.[1] Not sure how
on-demand would help with the latter.

[1] [https://jrupprechtlaw.com/drone-
insurance](https://jrupprechtlaw.com/drone-insurance)

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apolishch
Care does need to be taken with LiPo batteries , ideally charging them with a
compatible balance charger. If they are to be stored for a prolonged period,
often the batteries can be discharged to a “storage” capacity. It is good
practice to always charge and store your lipo batteries in a lipo safe bag
(available from most hobby stores). Always follow the LiPo battery
manufacturer guidelines!

With that out of the way: A subscription product is something that we're
currently working on which will offer you out of flight cover. It's still in
the early stages at the moment but if you sign up to our newsletter on our
website you'll be the first to know when it rolls out.

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gloopit
Will be interesting to see if they can apply this to other markets. You'd
think if they could quantify the risk for flying robots then they'd be able to
do it for anything.

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apolishch
First off, a disclaimer. I am Abe, and I lead the engineering team at Flock.

With that out of the way, yes, our algorithmic risk assessments leverage real-
time data to identify real time, geospatial risk. It is absolutely our long
term vision to use this to make insurance generally more fair, easy to use,
and, yes, cost effective to both the insurers and the insured. In pursuit of
this goal, we are currently working with other insurers to identify whether
our core technology can be used in other industries.

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swyx
i know this is a bad question but the TAM for this is... not inspiring. this
would be a nice small biz but i dont know how this is a venture scale biz.
maybe they have plans to expand beyond drones.

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grvdrm
Many insurance businesses don’t align with venture scale.

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bradsayers1
What a cool company. Congrats on the raise!

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apolishch
Thanks! We are, of course, hiring:
[https://flockcover.workable.com/](https://flockcover.workable.com/)

