BlueZoo turns to Google Cloud and AI to redefine property insurance

One of the most exciting parts of our jobs at Google Cloud is learning from our customers about industries, innovations, and what we can do together with differentiated technology. Our customers are the ones who transform businesses and improve the lives of millions, and being with them on the journey is rewarding on so many levels.

That's why we’re so pleased to announce that BlueZoo, a Menlo Park, Calif.-based startup focused on transforming the property insurance and the real estate industries, has chosen to innovate and build on Google Cloud. They have made it their mission to leverage our data and artificial intelligence products to build new and more accurate ways of measuring building occupancy to reduce insurance costs, improve building safety, and reinvent how people think about buildings.

Generally, property insurers  gather and analyze information on a large number of buildings and set premiums for the average building in that group. While this process allows insurers to predict the aggregate likelihood of a claim, it can limit visibility into the unique risk factors among different buildings. This can result in making property insurance more expensive than it should be—contributing to the “insurance protection gap” of property owners who are un- or under-insured. 

Using anonymized Wi-Fi signals from mobile phones and privacy-protected optical sensors enabled by Google Cloud, BlueZoo is changing this process. By combining cloud compute power and storage efficiency for training machine learning models with robust edge inference, BlueZoo sensors deliver precise and timely data to insurers. The optical sensors will measure with 99% accuracy things like lighting usage, foot traffic, areas of congestion, and many other risk metrics. So while insurers may occasionally send risk engineers to assess a particular building, BlueZoo measures risk continuously, making it possible to more accurately price risk or work with building owners to mitigate risk. 

"Google Cloud is the obvious platform choice for startups, in cloud data storage, in cloud computing, and especially in developing and refining new machine learning models," said Bill Evans, CEO of BlueZoo. "Google’s Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) make it possible to analyze data at the edge, so that personally identifiable information is never communicated to the cloud," an advantage that enables regulatory compliance in all major markets, while ensuring quality performance. "No one else provides this kind of infrastructure."

Besides incorporating TPUs in its sensors, BlueZoo uses Google Cloud tools like Vertex AI, our unified platform for machine learning operations; BigQuery, our scalable and serverless data warehouse; and Looker, our embedded platform for business intelligence and data analytics.

This is only the start, and not just for BlueZoo. Google’s broad portfolio of cutting-edge capabilities and technology make it easier for startups to build solutions to meet the core challenges of many industries. The insurance industry is being transformed by the adoption of usage-based insurance and Google, with BlueZoo, is working to support that transition. We are helping insurers better measure and predict risk to prevent claims, offering a better solution than simply pricing risk more accurately. By helping insurers better manage risk, we’re helping insurers lower premium prices and close the insurance gap—improving the lives of millions across the world.