The following interview is a conversation we had with Robert Kozikowski, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Tensorflight, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $7 Million Raised to Build the Future of Commercial Property Inspections.
Robert Kozikowski
Thank you.
Brett
Yeah, no problem. So before we can talking about what you’re building, could we just start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background?
Robert Kozikowski
Sure. So my name is Robert I’m well, I ran Co-Founder of Tensorflight, and prior to Tensorflight, I was a software engineer working at Google, some Quantif hedge fund in London, US. And basically, for example, in Quantif hedge fund, I work in a data analytics department, and we’re trading based on data. And this kind of was part of what realized how high the value just data in financial industry has. Right. Like it’s a fuel of not just advertising, but finance industry even more so. And at software engineer at Google, for example, I work at Google Confer, that was product that’s well, now it’s discontinued, but were using machine learning to rank insurance quotes. So that was kind of my touch with insurance. And we started testerflight. It was 2016, so it’s quite a long time. Right now I was more working on testroflight than actually my rest of my career.
Robert Kozikowski
After finishing studies right. I studied computer science. I kind of was coding the whole life. Now I’m not coding that much anymore as startups evolve. But I think that’s the case with many engineers. Even if they don’t do startups and work in large corporations, they end up when they’re over 30, they end up not coding that much anymore. Right.
Brett
Yeah. Makes a lot of sense and certainly something that we see now. Two questions that we like to ask just to better understand what makes you tick as an entrepreneur. So first one, is there a Founder that you really admire? And if so, who is it and what do you admire about them?
Robert Kozikowski
I think probably for me, it would be Larry Page, Sergey Green, I would say, because it’s also the new Gogo. Obviously it’s a very successful company, but for quite long time, it kind of stayed to the scientific engineering roots, and there were really not as much controversies as with some other large, successful startups that were funded today. Right. And it’s like now a very successful company. So for me, everything was kind of done right. Technically, there was a very interesting product technically. And the company for quite a long time, stayed true to its ethos.
Brett
Nice, good call out. And what about books? Is there a specific book that’s had a major impact on you as an entrepreneur?
Robert Kozikowski
Yeah, for me I was thinking about this question actually. The book is underwriting commercial property because you look all of the startups advice and they say you have to really understand your customer, but you should be reading a book about understanding your customer, not the book telling you that you need to understand your customer. Right, and for me that was because I didn’t work insurance prior. Maybe Google Commerce a little bit counts as insurance. Right, but basically that’s a book written from the perspective of our black chunk of our users. Right, and that was the book that helped me the most, right. In that sense. Right, nice.
Brett
I can’t say that’s a book that I’ve read, but maybe if I ever move into this industry, I’ll have to give that a read. But no, I like how you phrase that.
Robert Kozikowski
Right.
Brett
You don’t really need to read a book that tells you, hey, you need to go understand your customers. Just go read the book to understand your customers.
Robert Kozikowski
Yeah, exactly, right. That would be top advice in the book and the whole chapter that you have to understand your customers. So spend time understanding your customers, not reading that you should be understanding your customers. Right?
Brett
Yeah, makes a lot of sense. I love that. All right, well, let’s switch gears now and let’s talk about Tensorflight. So what’s the origin story behind the company?
Robert Kozikowski
So when we started with similar product but a little bit different from what we do. So when it was 2016, that was actually lots of hype for drones. There were new regulation, there was lots of investing in drones. And we started by analyzing drone imagery to actually our first customer was QB, but on the side of drone analytics. Right. So our kind of series, a lead investor and customer QB, we started with drone analytics of some agricultural orchards, different farms, we providing metrics using machine learning, computer vision. But over time the problem with drones is that just scale is not there, right. If you apply AI, you’re kind of making money on scale. And the problem with drones is that there were just too few drone flights, too much challenges with drone flights to really make it that computer vision startups would succeed. Right, because that’s one of core competencies of our company is computer vision.
Robert Kozikowski
And then we moved to satellites and also working with insurance, a few other industries. And over time from a few industries we’re working within satellite analytics, we kind of cut down to just insurance. Right, so we started drones insurance. Then from drones went up to satellites and from satellites we kind of narrowed down to just buildings and kind of always staying within area of computer vision because that was our specialty as a team.
Brett
Super interesting. Now, when we look at the competitive landscape, what does that look like? Is it drone company you’re competing with? Or is it property inspection? Who are those primary competitors?
Robert Kozikowski
So the question is how the insurance have been underwriting today, right? So let’s say you’re underwriter. You want to know better about maybe automate some process, get better data, right? The first area is you would look at things like taxes. So there are a few companies that are really large companies in publicly traded that work with kind of this type of data sets like CoreLogic, Verisc and so that’s kind of one category. Another one, you can send inspectors, you can make manual inspections yourself, but it’s too expensive usually, right? So most companies just can afford to inspect a few percent of properties they are underwriting, right? And then when you go into area of computer vision, there are similar startup companies to us, like Cape Analytics, Betterview, Arturo’s St. And we differ within this category by firstly, we focus more on commercial properties than just residential.
Robert Kozikowski
We also focus on whole structure, not just roof. So most of our competitors get maybe more detailed at the roof, but do not look at other attributes like construction type about the building or replacement costs or Occupancy type. Or we’re also more global. So we work in not just us, but Western Europe, Australia, Canada. We have requests every day from all around the globe. And maybe we’re kind of very more Ng company in a way. It’s kind of changing lately, but we kind of always were as the one of differentiator, we’re more engineering focused company when comparing to those competitors.
Brett
Right?
Robert Kozikowski
So kind of to summarize, either taxes, which is out of date, and it’s inconsistent and spotty, and there are companies like Coralogic Verisk or Inspections or manual lookups, and it’s expensive, slow, inconsistent, or other startups that focus on other type of buildings than we do.
Brett
Got it. And I think I’ve read on your website that it’s a 25% in cost reduction for personal property inspections. Is that accurate?
Robert Kozikowski
Yes, of course. But such metric, it’s complicated to calculate depending how much you’re inspecting already. Right? So kind of each metrics like this really needs to be calculated per customer and how they’re dealing with the problem today. Right? So that was from one case study with one client and that’s number that came from this client. And for some clients, it can be lower or better depending on how they do it already today.
Brett
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Brett
Now back today’s episode. Now talk to me about your journey to finding Product Market fit, because it sounds like you’re there, right? Do you have product market fit today?
Robert Kozikowski
Yeah, definitely.
Brett
What was that journey like? Were there any major changes or discoveries or pivots that you had to make along that journey and reaching that product market fit?
Robert Kozikowski
Yeah, we started by this journey from drones to satellites to buildings in the beginning and the product needs, and as soon as we really in 2016 was drones, then late 2017, we already had basically what we’re doing in 2017 to now. The problem didn’t change by a lot, but there was really the kind of real market fit maybe last two years. And that really was about nailing the solution. Because when people think you make buildings, okay, it’s simple, just look at the building and tell it this, but they are so many different shapes and sizes, year built standards which geocoding, or in case of commercial properties, you can have multiple buildings per address, multiple addresses per building. So just even figuring out what needs to be insured is a challenge. So it was basically 2016 to 17, maybe major pivots. And then over time, it was just refining the solution, integrating different imagery resources, integrating different external data sets to help with geocoding training models, retraining models over the time.
Robert Kozikowski
Right, so 2017 to 2021, it was working with customers, refining the solution to the level that it can scale automatically.
Brett
And in terms of the scale and the traction and adoption that you’re seeing, are there any numbers that you’re okay with sharing that just highlight that growth?
Robert Kozikowski
I wanted to share more detailed number, but the few people says, oh, well, maybe we don’t want to share that much detail. So maybe the numbers right now we have a few hundred percent year over year growth. We work with few large insurance companies, so in case of commercial property insurance, we work with three out of five biggest commercial property insurers in US. That’s Fortune 500 companies, and they’re using the solution actively over the time. And in terms of revenue, it puts us in a good spot for upcoming series B fundraising. And yeah, I ask if I can share more, but kind of who agreed? That’s kind of amount of information that we can share, basically.
Brett
Yeah, no worries at all. We always respect that and know that private companies don’t always want to share everything, so no worries at all there. So you had mentioned that you work with some big brands or some big companies, and every startup, I think, dreams of being able to land those types of deals and to be able to say those types of things. What do you think you got right? Why were you able to break through the noise to build trust with these customers. What did you do? Right?
Robert Kozikowski
Do you think basically quite early on we just listened to feedback of basically a few of our bigger companies. We’re working with a lot of work. We just almost not custom build, but because those companies have very similar solution, right, so we just problems. So we just kept talking to a few companies and basically just building what they told us. Right, so it’s kind of like we’re joking that our product management department is our customer underwriter, right. We only recently seriously took the stuff like roadmapping because previously it was like just ask what they need improved and were just improving what they told us. Right, because we had this long period like 2017, 2021 that we kind of were, because what we’re solving is a problem that existed in the industry for years. But it’s kind of very hard because there’s so many corner cases with buildings, with underwriting.
Robert Kozikowski
So those companies, we had very lots of interest initially because they say, oh wow, someone sold it. But maybe 2017, 2018 we didn’t. So we never had a hard time of getting interest only initially, we had to refine the solution.
Brett
Makes a lot of sense. And if we look at the challenges that you faced, if we had to pick one challenge, what would you say was your greatest challenge so far and how’d you overcome it?
Robert Kozikowski
The slow sales cycle insurance kind of tends to be problem that even if you have already working solution, there’s clear market fit. It’s really like a yearly sales cycle for those larger companies we’re working with. And over time we just learn how to cut it. Right, like we get some security certificate like ISO 27, one that kind of cuts down on the It assessment, right? Like we standardize the agreement, we have a few options. If we sped up on agreement negotiations in terms of if they want to go with their templates, we already have those questions ready, right? Like we have some tools built for evaluation process. So kind of if you look at this yearly sales cycle, just looking at what were the bottlenecks and how can we really resolve those, right.
Brett
Makes a lot of sense. Now let’s zoom out in the future. So let’s talk three year vision. So three years from today, what’s the company look like and what’s that vision that you’re working towards?
Robert Kozikowski
Yeah. So in case of medium term roadmap, we think in two areas, kind of T shaped focus, I would say, and one is just going deeper into insurance and from just providing just building attributes, we provide additional risk scores, additional more in depth analytics than building attributes. Right, like let’s say for example, some scores likely probability of building getting damaged by hurricane and so on. Right, so in that terms, the long term vision in that area is just fully automated insurance pricing, right. That’s kind of dream for many insurance companies that you can get accurately priced insurance without manual tweaking, without judging anything by feeling of underwriters. So in terms of insurance, that’s this kind of fully quantifiable full automated pricing of insurance. And we’re also working of providing building information to other industries. So real estate, mortgage, underwriting, some climate risk, some finance, right?
Robert Kozikowski
And just scaling to have the most detailed building information database on the market with up to date accurate building information.
Brett
Nice, love that. Super exciting. Robert, I’d love to keep you on and keep asking you questions and dig deeper into the company and technology, but unfortunately we are up on time so we’ll have to wrap before we wrap up here. If people want to follow along with your journey as you continue to build, where’s the best place for them to go?
Robert Kozikowski
The marketing have been amazing on keeping LinkedIn up to date recently. So our LinkedIn is the most active channel right now. We have also other channels but LinkedIn have been great for us recently.
Brett
Awesome. Sounds great. We’ll definitely have to check that out. Robert, thank you so much for coming on, sharing your story and talking about everything that you’re building. This has been a lot of fun and it’s been super interesting and we wish you the best of luck in executing on this vision.
Robert Kozikowski
Thank you very much. Thank you for your time.
Brett
No problem, take care, keep in touch.
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