The task for insurance adjusters is enormous in the wake of back to back hurricanes Helene and Milton, which caused catastrophic damage across several southern states. For decades, these adjusters have used the same methods to assess property damage after natural disasters. They visit individual properties and use small airplanes with high resolution cameras to view damage to roofs, structures and neighborhoods. The planes speed the process and help prioritize specific claims.
New technology, however, using drones, artificial intelligence and weather balloons aims to modernize and accelerate that process. Near Space Labs, a Brooklyn, New York-based startup, invented “Swifts,” or stratospheric, AI-enabled robotic cameras that fly on weather balloons. Space Labs is using Swifts to assess property risk, but by next year, they will be deployed to assess damage from climate-related disasters.
“With our balloons and our Swifts, insurance companies are able to get access to information right after the catastrophe and assess the damage and pay out claims within days instead of weeks and months,” said Rema Matevosyan, CEO of Near Space Labs.
The giant weather balloons fly twice as high as airplanes cruise. The cameras provide high-resolution imagery over thousands of square miles, according to the company.
“Our balloons capture what 800,000 drones would with one flight,” Matevosyan said. “An airplane would be flying in a snake like pattern, back and forth, back and forth for weeks to capture the data that we can capture within hours. This means that we can be faster, better and cheaper for our customers.”
And it’s not just for use after a storm. Insurance and reinsurance companies, like Swiss Re, are using Near Space to help them understand and price risk. The imagery of specifics, like roof characteristics, surrounding vegetation and defensible space are all fed into customer AI datasets. That part is especially attractive to investors.
“If you are actually going to be able to use AI to do risk analysis, you need a cheap, abundant source of imagery, and we believe that at least over the next decade, Near Space is probably the cheapest way to do this,” said Shaun Abrahamson, Managing Partner at Third Sphere, an investor in Near Space Labs.
In addition to Third Sphere, Near Space Labs is backed by Crosslink Capital, Wireframe Ventures, IAG Firemark Ventures, Toyota Ventures and Leadout Capital. It has raised $24 million in funding.
Near space has flown more than 1,000 commercial missions to assess risk, but it is still ramping up its operations for disaster response. Matevosyan said that by next year it will have scaled to a point where it can react to major climate disaster events immediately. The entire Swift system fits in a suitcase and can be shipped to operators anywhere.
“The way our operators launch our platforms is you flick a switch, you attach it to a helium balloon and let it go. Everything else happens autonomously,” she said.
CNBC producer Lisa Rizzolo contributed to this piece.
Bluesky has surged in popularity since the presidential election earlier this month, suddenly becoming a competitor to Elon Musk’s X and Meta’s Threads. But CEO Jay Graber has some cautionary words for potential acquirers: Bluesky is “billionaire proof.”
In an interview on Thursday with CNBC’s “Money Movers,” Graber said Bluesky’s open design is intended to give users the option of leaving the service with all of their followers, which could thwart potential acquisition efforts.
“The billionaire proof is in the way everything is designed, and so if someone bought or if the Bluesky company went down, everything is open source,” Graber said. “What happened to Twitter couldn’t happen to us in the same ways, because you would always have the option to immediately move without having to start over.”
Graber was referring to the way millions of users left Twitter, now X, after Musk purchased the company in 2022. Bluesky now has over 21 million users, still dwarfed by X and Threads, which Facebook’s parent debuted in July 2023.
X and Meta didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
Threads has roughly 275 million monthly users, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in October. Although Musk said in May that X has 600 million monthly users, market intelligence firm Sensor Tower estimates 318 million monthly users as of October.
Bluesky was created in 2019 as an internal Twitter project during Jack Dorsey’s second stint as CEO, and became an independent public benefit corporation in 2022. In May of this year, Dorsey said he is no longer a member of Bluesky’s board.
“In 2019, Jack had a vision for something better for social media, and so that’s why he chose me to build this, and we’re really thankful for him for setting this up, and we’ve continued to carry this out,” said Graber, who previously founded Happening, a social network focused on events. “We’re building an open-source social network that anyone can take into their own hands and build on, and it’s something that is radically different from anything that’s been done in social media before. Nobody’s been this open, this transparent and put this much control in the users hands.”
Part of Bluesky’s business plan involves offering subscriptions that would let users access special features, Graber noted. She also said that Bluesky will add more services for third-party coders as part of the startup’s “developer ecosystem.”
Graber said Bluesky has ruled out the possibility of letting advertisers send algorithmically recommended ads to users.
“There’s a lot on the road map, and I’ll tell you what we’re not going to do for monetization,” Graber said. “We’re not going to build an algorithm that just shoves ads at you, locking users in. That’s not our model.”
Bluesky has previously experienced major growth spurts. In September, it added 2 million users following X’s suspension in Brazil over content moderation policy violations in the country and related legal matters.
In October, Bluesky announced that it raised $15 million in a funding round led by Blockchain Capital. The company has raised a total of $36 million, according to Pitchbook.
Alphabet shares slid 6% Thursday, following news that the Department of Justice is calling for Google to divest its Chrome browser to put an end to its search monopoly.
The proposed break-up would, according to the DOJ in its Wednesday filing, “permanently stop Google’s control of this critical search access point and allow rival search engines the ability to access the browser that for many users is a gateway to the internet.”
This development is the latest in a years-long, bipartisan antitrust case that found in an August ruling that the search giant held an illegal monopoly in both search and text advertising, violating Section 2 of the Sherman Act.
The potential break-up would include preventing Google from entering into exclusionary agreements with competitors like Apple and Samsung, part of a set of remedies that would last 10 years.
POLAND – 2024/11/13: In this photo illustration, the NVIDIA company logo is seen displayed on a smartphone screen. (Photo Illustration by Piotr Swat/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
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Nvidia shares dropped in U.S. premarket trading Thursday after the tech giant’s third-quarter earnings failed to impress investors.
Shares of the chipmaker slumped 3.21% at around 5:03 a.m. ET, following the Wednesday release of Nvidia’s quarterly results, which beat on both the top and bottom lines.
Revenue came in at $35.08 billion, up 94% year-on-year and exceeding the $33.16 billion forecast by LSEG analysts. Earnings per share was 81 cents adjusted, also above analyst expectations.
Other chipmakers fell on the back of the market reaction to Nvidia’s third-quarter results. Shares of Intel, Qualcomm and Micron Technology all lost 1% or more in value, while AMD declined 0.6%.
The slump in Nvidia also had a knock-on effect on European semiconductor firms. ASML, a key chip equipment supplier, dropped 0.9%, while compatriot Dutch chip firm ASMI fell 0.5%. Chipmakers BE Semiconductor, STMicroelectronics and Infineon slipped 0.8%, 0.7 and 0.6%, respectively.
Several notable chip names were also in negative territory in Asia. TSMC, which makes Nvidia’s high-performance graphics processing units, eased as much as 1.5%. Contract electronics manufacturer Foxconn dropped 1.9%.
Why are Nvidia shares falling?
Nvidia has largely cornered the market for the high-powered chips powering the world’s most advanced artificial intelligence models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Despite nearly doubling sales year-on-year, Nvidia’s third-quarter results showed a slowdown from previous quarters. Nvidia previously reported growth of 122% in the second quarter, 262% in the first quarter, and 265% in the fourth quarter of 2023.
Derren Nathan, head of equity research at Hargreaves Lansdown, said in emailed comments Wednesday that the dip in Nvidia’s share price “suggests even outstanding isn’t enough for some investors,” adding that he expects the stock to bounce back once markets open.
“NVIDIA’s generated stellar gains for shareholders over many years now, and right now it’s pretty hard to see any major holes in the investment case,” Nathan added.
Analysts are looking ahead to the much-anticipated launch of Nvidia’s next-generation chip called Blackwell. On the firm’s earnings call, CEO Jensen Huang said that demand for the chip is exceeding supply.