Jay Bregman had a problem.
It was 2015 and the entrepreneur had just left Hailo, the on-demand ride-hailing company he co-founded in 2011. In his free time Bregman became an enthusiast of drones—a.k.a. Unmanned aerial vehicles—but he couldn’t really find suitable insurance for his hobby.
Then he spoke with acquaintances who worked with drones in a commercial context. They couldn’t find suitable insurance, either—an even bigger problem since their potential customers wouldn’t engage without a proper safety net.
“They were paying as much for a drone as they were for a Cessna, because of these annual insurance policies,” he told me earlier today on Coins2Day Live, our weekly show that streams on Coins2Day.com at 11 a.m. Eastern. “Drones are democratizing aviation but need an insurance layer as well.”
So he started Verifly, a New York company that sells million-dollar insurance policies (exclusively through a mobile app) to personal and commercial drone operators.
There are restrictions, mind you—you can’t yet get insurance in all 50 U.S. States, and you can’t yet insure an organized drone race.
But you will soon. And maybe—just maybe!—this drone thing will really, well, take off.
(Watch our conversation in the video above.)