Nishan Degnarain Hello and welcome to another exciting episode in our sustainability, ESG and space series. My name is Nishan. Miki Sode And I'm Miki Sodi.
Nishan Degnarain And we're delighted to be back with another, interesting, episode. This episode, we've got a, interesting user of space data. It's a company called Delos who uses space data to develop insurance products. And that creates a really interesting opportunity for us. What does the, what does the end user look like, and what is the ability of the end user to, shape sustainability, topics in space.
Nishan Degnarain And so with that, we're delighted to invite the CEO of Delos, Kevin Stein, to our podcast. Kevin, welcome. Kevin Stein Thank you. Sean. Very happy to be here. Nishan Degnarain Excellent. So maybe I should start by, if you could just introduce, Delos, what does Delos do? And also maybe a little bit of your journey and how you came to, value space data and insurance products that you've been developing?
Kevin Stein Sure. Absolutely. It's been an interesting and winding experi. So I am an aerospace engineer. I did my master's at Stanford and in aeronautics and astronautics, did my career in satellite spacecraft design. I was a mechanical systems engineer by trade, but worked in, you know, sort of more on the manufacturing side, more on the design side and on the sales side for a while, from the large companies, to the small, you know, startups, CubeSat companies, actually worked in the lab at Stanford that, you know, co-invented the CubeSat.
Kevin Stein So I have a lot of experience in sort of many different aspects. As everybody knows, is listening to this podcast, every aerospace engineer dreams of selling insurance. So I'm happy to report that I made it and everybody else is kind of getting left behind. So they should they should get on their horse and get here.
Kevin Stein No, we we, myself, my co-founder, we, we come from the aerospace world. The reason why we ended up in the insurance industry is that we were looking across, all use cases of space based data, and we were trying to find something that fit the sort of Venn diagram of a very large industry, an industry that doesn't utilize space based data but could, significantly benefit economically from space based data and something that we were passionate about in the end, where we, ended up was focusing on climate change.
Kevin Stein What we really cared about was trying to prepare a world when we started this company in 20 1617, prepare our world for understanding the effects of climate change and helping consumers understand how to live within that world. And therefore we looked at catastrophes being in California, California native. So as my co-founder, our focus was wildfires, as before, the big, wind driven fires that we saw in 2017 with the Tubbs Fire and Thomas Fire.
Kevin Stein And I think everybody remembers that that lives here. As before those started, we simply had a view that climate change was going to get worse and it was going to drive, significantly more extreme wildfire activity. And we believe that people would not necessarily realize that this is going to affect society in a variety of different ways.
Kevin Stein We then looked at how can we operationalize this data, and we found that the insurance industry was really the perfect fit. First of all, it has, the level of revenue that allows you to continuously turn the flywheel of innovation as it relates to wildfire modeling, understanding the risk as it moves forward. But also it has connection points, right?
Kevin Stein It's connected to if you do it right, hundreds of thousands, potentially millions of property owners, be them homeowners or commercial property owners. And you already understand their risk. So you can communicate to these folks what their risk is, educate them about their own risk and help them understand how to harden themselves, protect themselves, and sort of live within this world where they may be threatened by wildfire activity.
Kevin Stein So we embarked on that journey, and it took a while to understand the industry and, really hone our products to be the right fit for the market that we were serving. But years into it at this point, we have accomplished that, and the company is off and running.
Nishan Degnarain Excellent. So so you're a, an end user of space data. I mean, how do you think about that? Do you rely on a single source? You rely on solutions. And, you know, part of what we're doing as part of this podcast is all to understand some of the risks of lack of coordination in space and some of the risks there. Nishan Degnarain So how do you think about some of the the risks and reliance on space data? Well, if there was a lack of coordination amongst that, I'll bring.
Kevin Stein Yeah, it's a great question. You know, our sort of reason for creating the company was, a way to operationalize space based data. But of course, the company itself is selling a product that is a last mile solution for a ground based industry. Right. And so we have to create not just the best product that we can, not just the most, efficient financially, product that we can, but also make sure that we're managing the risks associated with availability of that data.
Kevin Stein And so, of course, my board tasks me and my co-founder with understanding the risk of every single aspect of the company, be it our data streams or our partners or our individuals, and making sure that we are resilient and robust to, any one of those disappear, for whatever reason it may be, when it comes to the modeling product, that we have, we have to look at alternative backup data streams, if you will, which has a really interesting effect of, you know, decision making on which data to choose from.
Kevin Stein Of course, when you know, you're making a product that simply is the best product for the customer, of course, product market fit, that's what you have to create to create a successful company. When you're looking at that, you can't be tied to anyone, source of data, anyone, really anything. Right? You have to really just make sure you're scouring the industry in the market, for the best available and then in the best fit and going from there.
Kevin Stein But of course, that in addition to needing to be robust to any, data stream disappearing, we make sure that we have backups. What that does is that puts basically data in direct competition with ground based data. Of course. And therefore we need to make sure that we're assessing, what is going to be the best, solution or fit, you know, for us, one thing that one of the sort of philosophies that I have coming from the space industry was really that there needs to be more last mile solutions created for ground based industries.
Kevin Stein And I strongly feel and those ground based solutions for sort of more free market industries as opposed to relying a little bit too much, potentially on government funding or, grant funding or anything like that. And therefore, I think it's very healthy to have a situation where you have always spatial data in competition with ground based data, and that pushes the data.
Kevin Stein Coming from space based assets to need to constantly evolve and, innovate to make sure that they can be and will be the best solution for any given, last mile solution out there. Miki Sode Interesting. So, you know, you and I met, a space conference long time ago. I think it was probably the beginning of the last two and 2015. Kevin Stein 2016.
Miki Sode Yeah. So I bring up conference because if you go to, say, Space Symposium or any of those big space conference conferences, right, we don't see end users like you or anybody else who might use space based data or space enabled products and, knowledge. Right. And but I'm sure you go to say insurance company, conferences.
Miki Sode Right. And you see, people in the, in your sector or the business, but not space people. Right? So I think what I'm trying to get at is that, like, what do you wish Safe Space Sector to know from your perspective and maybe vice versa? That might help bridge the gap and have a more, like a more, I guess, not siloed, but like a more, more communication between the two sectors.
Kevin Stein Yeah, more more integrated. Yeah. Maybe. It's funny, when we met, we, my co-founder and I were actually working on a separate business plan. We're working on a space hardware, company, and we decided to shut down that that company ourselves. We had some amazing innovative technology with, one of my previous, professors from Stanford that allowed us to take some, inner satellite communication hardware and really reduce the size because of sort of innovative power, that we were able to bring to it doesn't really matter.
Kevin Stein The reality is we set up the company and realized that there just we were selling to other space based assets. There simply was not enough things in space to ever justify the creation of a company. The revenue wasn't there. For for the once there is a little bit more information about about what it is. Tell us does, Delta is an insurance provider in California.
Kevin Stein We take satellite imagery and, other data and turn that into future predictive wildfire risk models. Not surprisingly, one of the biggest risks to home insurance and homes in California as wildfires, wildfire as a peril is covered under home insurance. We found throughout our, experience getting into the industry that creating a model and selling it to carriers was really not ever going to solve for the coverage gap problems.
Kevin Stein The the, fact that insurance was not able to understand future predictive risk was not able to understand wildfire exposure. And therefore, we built an insurance provider around the wildfire models that we created. And now today we ensure, I think, $85 million worth of premium across California. That's like 30,000 homes or so. We are actually the leading, specialty home insurance provider in California at this time.
Kevin Stein And we are in the process of onboarding significantly larger amounts of backing to be able to push, the amount of insurance that we can. Right. In California, up to about 400 billion, from from this, the 85 that we're at right now, which would put us in, in, you know, close to the top ten, insurance companies in California.
Kevin Stein So we've been able to really operationalize these wildfire models in a in a way that is very effective. It's a great fit for the problem. The products are great fit for the market. And that was kind of one of the things we realized when we shut down the space hardware company, we realized the space industry is full of brilliant technologists that come up with brilliant technology, and it's not full of tons of revenue.
Kevin Stein And so, you know, this is a while ago at that time, but, of course, you know, being an aerospace engineer and keep tabs on my, on my industry, what I believe the.
Kevin Stein So what I came to understand when I shut down the space hardware company and started to look for other things that I could do in the space industry, was that the space industry is full of brilliant technologists with brilliant technology. But there's a very large untapped opportunity, and that's to be able to take space space industry as business data.
Kevin Stein Excuse me. And implement that data, the use of that data, the ingestion of that data into very large ground based industries, specifically focused on the ones that, as I mentioned before, was not currently utilizing surface data and could significantly benefit from that data. I think, Miki, to your point, there is a lot of space focused folks that are absolute dreamers, brilliant people.
Kevin Stein So I love the space industry that frequent these types of events. And then you go to insurance as an example and many others, I'm certain, that on the ground probably shipping, you know, warehousing, agricultural, countless number of other, older industries. And there's not a bunch of aerospace engineers walking around. Right. So what I think, would enable the space industry to generate significantly larger amounts of revenue and diversify revenue in order to create a more, economically sustainable, diverse, set of solutions is to be able to create more last mile solutions where you're purely focused on translating, taking the space data and using that to create a solution for
Kevin Stein the end user. In these industries. The end user then doesn't even doesn't have to know how to use the data, and frankly, doesn't even have to know that the data comes from space, right? If you think of G.P.S. is a convenient example and obviously everybody's example in the space industry, but there's many more. If used GPS as an example, when you get in your car and tap on your phone to route you to a certain place, very few people, especially people outside the industry, space industry, are thinking, oh, this is going to space.
Kevin Stein I'm getting information from space here. They're not thinking that. They're just driving to their destination. For us, when people are buying our home insurance policy, they're not. I mean, part of our brand is home insurance powered by science. But probably these folks are buying this home insurance policy. Worried about getting home insurance, not thinking about how we use space based data to be able to, more accurately assess the risk of their home and therefore more accurately price their home, their insurance, and therefore try to get them a more affordable, policy, more solutions like that for shipping and trucking and agriculture and, atmospheric sciences, and, logistics, supply chain, hedge
Kevin Stein funds, financial industries. There's so many industries out there that generate massive amounts of money and value can be added to them in a way that is just the best solution out there. Therefore sustains through, any changes in, you know, budgeting in the government as an example or can be used across all, countries in the world. It's just a solution that's needed by, you know, by Earth.
Nishan Degnarain That's fascinating because as somebody resident in California, you can't get fire insurance even though it's surrounded by water. You know, I could see that. So now what you're effectively saying is that there are industry and there are niches within industries that space data or industries that rely on that space supply chain can actually identify and create new value.
Nishan Degnarain Because land based insurance cannot cover the scale of this type of wildfire insurance in California. But you found a niche. You've managed to, you know, find premiums of, of $80 million so far, right, that you've built. So that's value creation. And so you say that there's just all this untapped potential in churn, and we get going. Nishan Degnarain All right. And here we go.
Nishan Degnarain Hello and welcome to another exciting, episode on, sustainability, ESG and space series. My name is Deshaun. Miki Sode And I'm Miki. Sorry.
Nishan Degnarain And, we're, delighted to embark on another, interesting, episode. This episode, we've got a, interesting user of space data. It's a company called Delos who uses space data to develop insurance products. And that creates a really interesting opportunity for us. What does the, what does the end user look like, and what is the ability of the end user to, shape sustainability, topics in space.
Nishan Degnarain And so with that, we're delighted to invite the CEO of Delos, Kevin Stein, to our podcast. Kevin, welcome. Kevin Stein Thank you John. Very happy to be here. Nishan Degnarain Excellent. So maybe let's just start by, if you could just introduce, Delos, what does Delos do? And also maybe a little bit of your journey and how you came to, value space data and insurance products that you've been developing?
Kevin Stein Sure. Absolutely. It's been an interesting and winding experience. So I am an aerospace engineer. I did my master's at Stanford and in aeronautics and astronautics, did my career in satellite spacecraft design. I was a mechanical systems engineer by trade, but worked in, you know, sort of more on the manufacturing side, more on the design side and on the sales side for a while, from the large companies, to the small, you know, startups, CubeSat companies, actually worked in the lab at Stanford that, you know, co-invented the CubeSat.
Kevin Stein So I have a lot of experience in sort of many different aspects. As everybody knows, is listening to this podcast, every aerospace engineer dreams of selling insurance. So I'm happy to report that I made it. And everybody else is kind of getting left behind. So they should they should get on their horse and get here.
Kevin Stein No, we we, myself, my co-founder, we, we come from the aerospace world. The reason why we ended up in the insurance industry is that we were looking across, all use cases of space based data, and we were trying to find something that fit the sort of Venn diagram of a very large industry, an industry that doesn't utilize space based data but could, significantly benefit economically from space based data and something that we were passionate about in the end, where we, ended up was focusing on climate change.
Kevin Stein What we really cared about was trying to prepare a world. When we started this company in 2016, 17, prepare our world for understanding the effects of climate change and helping consumers understand how to live within that world. And therefore we looked at catastrophes being in California, California native. So as my co-founder, our focus was wildfires as before, the big, wind driven fires that we saw in 2017 with the Tubbs Fire and Thomas Fire, then I think everybody remembers that that lives here.
Kevin Stein As before those started, we simply had a view that climate change was going to get worse and it was going to drive, significantly more extreme wildfire activity. And we believe that people would not necessarily realize that this is going to affect society in a variety of different ways. We then looked at how can we operationalize this data, and we found that the insurance industry was really the perfect fit.
Kevin Stein First of all, it has, the level of revenue that allows you to continuously turn the flywheel of innovation as it relates to wildfire modeling, understanding the risk as it moves forward. But also it has connection points, right? It's connected to if you do it right, hundreds of thousands, potentially millions of property owners, be them homeowners or commercial property owners.
Kevin Stein And you already understand their risk. So you can communicate to these folks what their risk is, educate them about their own risk and help them understand how to harden themselves, protect themselves, and sort of live within this world where they may be threatened by wildfire activity. So we embarked on that journey, and it took a while to understand the industry and, really hone our products to be the right fit for the market that we were serving.
Kevin Stein But years into it at this point, we have accomplished that. And the company is off and running. Nishan Degnarain Excellent. So so you're a, an end user, of space data. I mean, how do you think about that? Do you rely on a single source? You rely on possible sources. And, you know, part of what we're doing as part of this podcast is also understand some of the risks of lack of coordination in space and some of the risks there.
Nishan Degnarain So how do you think about some of the the risks and reliance on space nature? Well, if there was a lack of coordination amongst that, I'll bring.
Kevin Stein Yeah, it's a great question. You know, our sort of reason for creating the company was, a way to operationalize space based data, but of course, the company itself is selling a product that is a last mile solution for a ground based industry. Right. And so we have to create not just the best product that we can, not just the most, efficient financially, product that we can, but also make sure that we're managing the resources associated with availability of that data.
Kevin Stein And so, of course, my board tasks me and my co-founder with understanding the risk of every single aspect of the company, be it our data streams or our partners or our individuals, and making sure that we are resilient and robust to, any one of those disappear and for whatever reason it may be, when it comes to the modeling product, that we have, we have to look at alternative backup data streams, if you will, which has a really interesting effect of, you know, decision making on which data to choose from.
Kevin Stein Of course, when you know, you're making a product that simply is your best product for the customer, of course, product market fit, that's what you have to create to create a successful company. When you're looking at that, you can't be tied to anyone, source of data, anyone, really anything. Right? You have to really just make sure you're scouring the industry in the market, for the best available and then in the best fit and going from there.
Kevin Stein But of course, that in addition to needing to be robust to any, data stream disappearing, we make sure that we have backups. What that does is that puts specialist data in direct competition with ground based data. Of course. And therefore we need to make sure that we're assessing, what is going to be the best, solution or fit, you know, for us, one thing that one of the sort of philosophies that I have coming from the space industry was really that there needs to be more last mile solutions created for ground based industries.
Kevin Stein And I strongly feel and those ground based solutions for sort of more free market industries as opposed to relying a little bit too much, potentially on government funding or, grant funding or anything like that. And therefore, I think it's, it's very healthy to have a situation where you have always specialized data in competition with ground based data, and that pushes the data, coming from space based assets to need to constantly evolve and, innovate to make sure that they can be and will be the best solution for any given, last mile solution out there.
Miki Sode Interesting. So, you know, you and I met, a space conference long time ago. I think it was probably the beginning of the last two. Kevin Stein And I think 2015, 2016.
Miki Sode Yeah. So I bring up conference because if you go to say Spacey podium or any of those big space conference conferences, right, we don't see end users like you or anybody else who might use space based data or space enabled products and, knowledge. Right. And but I'm sure you go to say, insurance company. Conferences.
Miki Sode Right. And you see, people in the, in your sector or the business, but not space people. Right? So I think what I'm trying to get at is that, like, what do you wish, say space sector to know from your perspective and maybe vice versa. That might help bridge the gap and have a more, like a more, I guess, not siloed, but like more, more communication between the two sectors.
Kevin Stein Yeah, more more integrated. Yeah. Maybe. It's funny, when we met, we my co-founder and I were actually working on a separate business plan. We're working on a space hardware, company, and we decided to shut down that. That company ourselves. We had some amazing innovative technology with, one of my previous, professors from Stanford that allowed us to take some, inner satellite communication hardware and really reduce the size because of sort of innovative power, that we were able to bring to it doesn't really matter.
Kevin Stein The reality is we set up the company and realized that there just we were selling to other space based assets. There simply was not enough things in space to ever justify the creation of a company. The revenue wasn't there. For for the listeners, just a little bit more information about about what it is. Tell us, does, Dell's is an insurance provider in California.
Kevin Stein We take satellite imagery and, other data and turn that into future predictive wildfire risk models. Not surprisingly, one of the biggest risks to home insurance in homes in California is wildfires. Wildfire as a peril is covered under home insurance. We found throughout our, experience getting into the industry that creating a model and selling it to carriers was really not ever going to solve for the coverage gap problems.
Kevin Stein The the, fact that insurance was not able to understand future predictive risk was not able to understand wildfire exposure. And therefore, we built an insurance provider around the wildfire model that we created. And now today, we insure as an $85 million worth of premium across California. It's like 30,000 homes or so. We are actually the leading, specialty home insurance provider in California at this time.
Kevin Stein And we are in the process of onboarding significantly larger amounts of backing to be able to push, the amount of insurance that we can. Right, in California, up to about 400 million, from from this, the 85 that we're at right now, which would put us in, in, you know, close to the top ten, insurance companies in California.
Kevin Stein So we've been able to really operationalize these wildfire models in a in a way that is very effective. It's a great fit for the problem. The products are great fit for the market. And that was kind of one of the things we realized when we shut down the space hardware company, we realized the space industry is full of brilliant technologists that come up with brilliant technology, and it's not full of tons of revenue.
Kevin Stein And so, you know, this is a while ago at that time. But, of course, you know, being an aerospace engineer, I keep tabs on my on my industry. What I believe the.
Kevin Stein So what I came to understand when I shut down the space hardware company and started to look for other things that I could do in the space industry, was that the space industry is full of brilliant technologists with brilliant technology. But there is a very large untapped opportunity, and that's to be able to take space space industry and it's physics data.
Kevin Stein Excuse me and implement that data, the use of that data, the ingestion of that data into very large ground based industries, specifically focused on the ones that, as I mentioned before, was not currently utilizing data and could significantly benefit from that data. I think Miki, to your point, there is a lot of space focused folks that are absolute dreamers.