Award Applications

Aerobotics is a data analytics company, making use of aerial imagery and machine learning algorithms to solve specific problems in multiple industries, currently agriculture and mining.

The company is now targeting the crop insurance market - their mission: deliver the first agricultural insurance product that benefits both farmer and insurer, all year round.

The problems:
Crop insurance inherently deals with large geographical areas, multiple risk factors, and significant claim values. The existing methods of pricing risk using broad indices, assessing loss using manual and subjective methods, and the level of fraud, are inaccurate and lead to higher costs of provision and higher premiums.

Additionally, farming is a capital-intensive industry where pro-active risk and resource management are vital to sustainability and maximising yield, yet no insurance provider currently equips their clients with the tools that would help them to succeed.
Inaccuracy leads to higher costs – both for the insurer, and the farmer; Aerobotics solves this.

Our dual benefit solution:
The product provides both parties with an end-to-end solution to lower cost of provision and cost of farming through providing accurate and useful data on a regular basis. To achieve this, drones are used to fly periodically over an insured farm, gathering multiple data-sets which are automatically uploaded and analysed to provide useful data to both insurer and farmer.

Insurers are finally able to assess their risk based on real data, enabling premium flexibility, claims accuracy and lowered re-insurance rates.

Farmers can manage their farm based on accurate data not previously available, allowing them to target resource usage, reduce waste and reduce risk.

Validation:
Aerobotics has built up a solid client base across Africa, Australia and Europe; currently scanning and auto-analysing in excess of 618,000 acres. The cloud-based Aeroview platform presents the data in aggregated form, allowing automated tracking of data analytics (such as NDVI, Volume, Height) over successive scans.

Taking this proven solution to the crop insurance market is the next step.

Market:
The crop insurance market continues grow across the globe – total premiums have grown to ~$30bn as of 2013.

Additionally, the proportion of emerging markets has grown from 13% to 22% between 2005-’11; these new markets present a challenge for the crop insurance industry as there is extremely limited historical data from which to base pricing decisions.

Competitive Advantage:
The competitive advantage lies in the unique ability to automatically compare data sets over time, producing deeper insights and automating processes. IP is primarily the ability to accurately overlay images from different time periods and different sources, to provide this trending data.

The market strategy is also to provide end-to-end packaged solutions, solving whole issues, rather than addressing part of them and leaving the rest to other parties.

Revenue Model:
Aerobotics has a standardised ‘per acre’ charging model that is currently in place for farmers, a tailored version of this billing model is proposed for the insurance solution – the company is also open to discussing innovative revenue models, including premium share.