5.4.22-Startup-Ecosystem-Hosta-Labs

RACHELLE VILLALON: I'm Rachelle, co-founder and CEO of Hosta. I am an MIT alum. I did my master's and PhD here years ago. And prior to arriving at MIT, I was an architect, a building architect.

Some of the challenges that my team and I had was actually going on to construction sites and measuring spaces with Lidar, expensive equipment, or tape measure, pen and clipboard. I knew there had to be a better way to do this. So ultimately I went off to MIT, ultimately did lots of AI work out here, and then wanted to commercialize a solution in that exact problem in construction. Right now, apparently the problem I had as an architect, millions of people have in the property insurance industry.

So what we do, essentially, is that you can take out your phone-- we are a centralist reality capture solution, no app, right? Take a picture of your space, and we can track all the building materials for planned measurements, 3D models, all from a simple picture. And we are sensorless. And so here's why we are interested in the property insurance space.

One of the number one reasons for customer churn is really a bad claims experience. Say your dishwasher breaks and it floods your entire basement. That's a really bad customer experience, if you can't get your claim done right away. So essentially what we do with our solution is the ability to now just quickly take a picture of your space, get all the measurements, materials, rates, and then an adjuster can ultimately now help you repair your damage much faster.

Insurance companies today spend about $350 in direct costs per interior assessment of a space. And so it's money not well spent, right? And we are enabling insurance companies, as well as contractors on site, to do their jobs much faster and efficient. Current solutions to date require an app to download or Lidar, or paper and pen still take up most of the work that's done here. And now with our centralist solution, you can get the items that you need much quicker.

Here everyone becomes an expert in property assessment. I apologize for the slide here, but essentially we take four to six photos of your space. We are able to get the materials, we'll tell you OK, this is how much drywall you have in this space, right? These are all the measurements here of all the square footages, this is this type of tile, this is this type of wood in your space.

We are lowering costs by 80%. We're 100% objective of what we see from a photo. And we have 90% faster cycle times. Simple application, you can either use our front end to take a picture or you can use our APIs, right? So simple, just take out your phone, no app, we'll quickly get all the width and height of that space, tell you the square footages of all the materials that are in that photo, tell you all the items that are in there in terms of content, right? And you get a detailed floor plan.

So, unlike other applications where you get a diagram, you actually get an architectural floor plan here where you can get see the Pochade line of the wall thicknesses, the materials on there. You see the dotted lines that tell you that there's cabinetry above the other cabinets, right? And so this can actually be used by a contractor.

And now you can use it to scale assessments across thousands of properties every day. We are working with the top 25 property insurance carriers right now, with our 21 person awesome team. And we have existing APIs, so that we can push into your existing workflows. We're looking for strategic partners in insurance, home improvement, and material manufacturing, who want to kick the tires with us on damage assessment and automated estimates.

So reach out to me. I am over at the booth in the back there, Hosta AI. Thanks.

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