When a Customer Becomes an Investor

Travelers Invests $3 Million in Kittyhawk

Last week while packing up to move into our new office, it was fitting that I found the first deck I prepared for our meeting with Travelers at CES circa January 2017. My co-founder Josh and I glamorously presented slide after slide, seated on the floor of the Las Vegas showroom, showing our passion and vision for what Kittyhawk could become. The next month we would head up to Connecticut to host our first training session at Travelers’ Claim University (“Claim U”). Despite the snow and ice, we decided to save a few bucks and walk to our morning meetings, and we haven’t looked back since.

Today we’re delighted to announce that Kittyhawk has secured $3M in funding from Travelers. You can read the press release here. In their words:

“Using drones to assess property damage enables us to enhance our customers’ experience, adjust claims more quickly and efficiently and improve safety for our employees and vendors,” said Nick Seminara, Executive Vice President, Claim Services at Travelers. “Kittyhawk helps us manage the vast amounts of information we gather on inspections so we can help our customers recover from disasters faster than ever before. We continue to leverage new technologies in our business, including within our drone program, and we are pleased to further our relationship with Kittyhawk.”

In Travelers we found the ultimate customer who shared our long term vision and also roots in flight. Travelers has insured space flights going back to early NASA missions, which has evolved to a whole gamut of risks, as we saw first hand at Claim U where full-scale models train people in every dimension of insurance claims. The most palpable aspect of Claim U is transformation. New technology is embraced, while obsolescence is removed. Fittingly, Claim U no longer houses palettes and palettes of ladders that used to aid in roof inspections, as drones have replaced the idea of people climbing up on roofs, just to take a look at damage.

At the time, Kittyhawk wasn’t the obvious pick to power what would soon become the largest enterprise drone program in the world, but Travelers wasn’t looking for obvious. They needed a company to deliver, with speed. They needed a team to execute, without excuses. They needed a platform optimized for mobile, focused on security, and built for scale.

Today, Kittyhawk is fortunate to work with industry-leading companies, ranging from rail to media, from utilities to agriculture, and from government agencies to insurance. We’re learning and evolving with these leading companies and continuing to build products that remove friction, layer in compliance, and enable our customers to do more with their data.

A few months ago we brought on some great new investors, including specialized and passionate institutional investors and our first strategic investor, Boeing HorizonX. Today’s investment by Travelers adds another fantastic partner, ultimately enabling our rapidly growing team to build more relationships with new partners.

Let’s fly,

Jon