The commercial drone industry is growing incredibly quickly, with use cases ranging from industry inspection to agriculture and photography.

Until now, it’s been impossible to identify and quantify risks – air hazards, ground hazards, collisions with people – in real time. Commercial drone operators want to drive safely, but they don’t have the tools. This has led to airport disruption and even the first drone-related death.

Which has led to a problem for the insurance industry: if insurers can’t quantify risk, it’s hard to sell premiums.

The Flock app offers drone pilots safe flying guidance and accurate, competitive single-flight insurance quotes on the spot.

We have partnered with Allianz – one of the leading aviation insurers – to launch our first consumer product. It brings enhanced flying experiences to pilots and allows Allianz to sell instant drone insurance anytime, anywhere.

Our data and insights are surfaced in a beautiful and simple experience. The mobile app provides pilots with a map that explains their risk environment in real time. We give them a large flight zone and identify hazards within that local environment – from buildings to population density and hyper-local weather.

This guidance is coupled with our ‘insure now’ offering – an offer to buy a completely customised insurance policy. With one click, operators are insured for 60 minutes. It’s that simple. We have reduced insurance premium periods from a year down to a single flight, allowing us to customise the price and type of insurance we can offer.

We collect huge amounts of flight data and claims data, which we feed back into the app, so our algorithms can get significantly more intelligent over time.