After 166 years in the business, Travelers Insurance is now the second largest insurance provider for commercial property casualty and third largest personal insurance writer in the United States.  They employ over 14,000 individual agents and have headquarter offices in Hartford, CT and New York City, NY.  After Hurricane Matthew in 2016, Travelers became one of the first insurance companies to begin utilizing drones when assessing damage claims.  As pioneers in using drones to their disposal, Travelers now has close to 600 FAA certified drone pilot claims professionals. 

To have a successful drone operation Travelers has partnered with Kittyhawk.  In fact, Travelers just awarded Kittyhawk $3 million to further their drone program.  Kittyhawk provides Travelers with the drone hardware and software they use.  Founded in 2015 by Jon Hegranes and Joshua Ziering in San Francisco, CA Kittyhawk is the largest community of commercial drone pilots.  They give companies a way of streamlining all the aspects of drone operations.  From collecting and storing data, to choosing the right drones and equipment for each client.

According to Kittyhawk’s website, “Managing a fleet of drones in hard.  Kittyhawk makes it easy with tools to make flights compliant and operations efficient.  Kittyhawk unifies the mission, aircraft and data to make drone operations safe and reliable.  Kittyhawk streamlines the disconnected collection of tools and technologies into a unified drone operation that makes flight safer and more valuable.”  This includes pre-flight planning, in-flight operations, LAANC (Low Altitude Authorization and Notification Capability), live streaming, and team management. 

Kittyhawk is aiding companies in many sectors like media and entertainment, oil and gas, construction, public safety, and insurance companies, like Travelers.  Nick Seminara is the Executive Vice President of Claim Services at Travelers and he is very excited for the work they are doing with Kittyhawk.  He said, “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.  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.”

Kittyhawk is helping to bridge the gap between wanting to use drones in a commercial setting, to actually seeing a commercial drone operation come to fruition.  CEO Jon Hegranes said, “Travelers is a model for other companies to follow when scaling a drone program.  We’re excited to deepen our relationship with a trusted industry leader as we bring drone operations to new industries. Our focus at Kittyhawk is continuing to build the best tools that make using drones approachable and effective. Every company can be a drone company.”