Property appraisals are at the heart of home appraisals, insurance claims, renovation projects, and a host of other important processes. Inaccurate or delayed appraisals can delay projects and cause consumers to pay higher costs.
Now, a platform first developed at MIT makes creating detailed property appraisals as easy as taking a few pictures. Alumni-founded startup Hosta ai analyzes images to produce precise room measurements, detailed floor plans, 3D room models, and bills of materials. You can also assess material conditions to assess damage and identify hazards, such as the use of flammable materials or improper sprinkler-to-volume ratios.
“Contracting and insurance companies almost never get the same estimate,” says Hosta ai CEO and co-founder Henriette Fleischmann MBA ’19, who founded the company with CEO and CTO Rachelle Villalon SM ’08, PhD ’17 . “Our technology is speeding up these processes and reducing friction for the adjuster, the contractor and the consumer. We are helping people repair their homes faster, so they can feel at home again.”
Hosta ai is currently working with insurers, contractors and mortgage lenders to provide everyone with fast and accurate information about their built environment. The founders say they are still considering the possibilities opened up by giving people a complete view of the properties without forcing them to go to the site.
“I think there is an opportunity to help speed up the transition to more energy-efficient buildings,” says Fleischmann. “We can create an understanding of how heat moves through a room. There are many applications across all industries that require an understanding of the built environment.”
A technology comes together
Villalón worked as an architect, software engineer and consultant before founding Hosta. As a third-generation architect, he had early exposure to the challenges on construction job sites, from documentation to project coordination, as well as the evolution of computer-aided design (CAD) systems.
At MIT, his research focused on applying artificial intelligence to problems in the built environment, including ways to teach machines about architecture and ways to turn images into maps and 3D objects. He spent his time as a master’s and doctoral student in the Computing and Design Group within the School of Architecture and Planning, as well as in the Media Lab and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).
“There were so many problems in architecture and construction, and I just remember that I thought I needed to improve my technical and theoretical foundations to challenge the limits of current industry practice,” says Villalón. “MIT became for me this utopia of information and knowledge. It helped me build a critical view of the industry and apply new creative technologies to it.”
Originally from Germany, Fleischmann worked at large companies in the automotive and fashion industries before coming to the MIT Sloan School of Management, where she received her MBA while focusing on AI and entrepreneurship.
“It was an incredible program,” says Fleischmann. “It helped me regain energy and think about what was coming next. I loved how convenient MIT was. I spent a lot of time in [Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship] and gravitated toward tech-heavy startups.”
When Fleischmann met Villalon, the PhD graduate was looking for a co-founder who could help drive the commercialization of Hosta ai’s technology. With a prototype available, a patent filed, and market trials underway with Hosta ai advisor José Pacheco MBA ’12, Villalón and Fleischmann made great strides at MIT.
“I remember sitting in a classroom at MIT, and I had taken a picture of Building 9 without an app or special sensors, I uploaded it with our first API and it came up with this list of results and blueprints showing all the items, their measurements. , and how big the spaces were,” says Villalón. “When I first saw that result, I just thought about how much time I had spent as an architect trying to manually recreate spaces, and now all I had to do was take a picture.”
The founders received funding from the MIT Sandbox and entered several MIT startup accelerator programs, including the School of Architecture and Planning’s MITdesignX, the MIT Industrial Linkage Program’s STEX25, and the Trust Center’s delta v accelerator. Hosta ai has continued to work with MIT through the CSAIL Alliances program and the Industrial Liaison Program.
Today, anyone in a home or workplace can click a link and follow Hosta ai’s prompts to take photos with their phone. Once the photos are uploaded, Hosta ai uses artificial intelligence to automatically create floor plans and CAD models. Beyond measurements, the software can categorize all the objects and materials in the room to create a detailed bill of materials, key information in determining how much a project will cost.
“With our solution, you can simply take a photo of a space. There’s no app, you don’t need any architecture knowledge, there’s no LIDAR or anything complicated, and you can extract all this information,” says Villalón. “We are also incorporating expert reasoning into the technology. It is truly a game changer in the industry.”
Scaled for impact
The founders say their solution cuts 80 percent of property appraisal wait times and avoids the errors associated with manual appraisals.
“The insurance adjuster gets a package that allows them to create a claim estimate in minutes,” says Fleischmann. “We realized that the big insurance companies are making estimates thousands of times a day. That equates to a lot of time and money saved.”
Hosta ai had trouble scaling at first, but in-person challenges caused by the Covid-19 pandemic helped accelerate business. The founders now say they are firmly in growth mode.
“At MIT we build momentum, but building a deep-tech company is challenging,” says Fleischmann. “My advice to founders is to try to create a minimum viable product quickly to act as a market sensor and then build on that.”
As Hosta ai continues to scale, the founders believe the technology promises to help companies reduce a major source of their greenhouse gas emissions.
“Our vision is to reduce carbon emissions by leading the global transition to virtual property appraisals,” says Fleischmann. “We are making sure that there is a change in the industry as a whole, not just in insurance, but in the entire built environment.”
