SAN DIEGO STARTUP YEMBO, CREATED BY FORMER QUALCOMM ENGINEERS, GETS $8.5M TO EXPAND

A San Diego tech startup founded by two former Qualcomm engineers just raised $8.5 million from investors to expand its reach into new industries.

The company, called Yembo, currently makes an AI-powered camera app that can measure the size and weight of furniture and other items in a room. This is particularly useful for moving companies, which use the app to estimate the workload of a move and deliver quotes to customers — without ever visiting in person. That business got a boost during the pandemic.

But now, Yembo’s new investors are backing a new use for the app: property insurance and underwriting inspections.

CEO and co-founder Siddharth Mohan has recent experience making a claims adjustment with his property insurance company and says the experience is fraught with inefficiencies.

“Someone comes out to your home with a tape measurer, pen and paper, and the whole process takes hours and hours,” Mohan said.

Yembo plans to build features in

its software that can map out a 3D model of a room so insurance adjusters can estimate square footage, cabinetry and countertop space, for example, and share that information with contractors.

Yembo was founded in 2016 by Mohan and his co-founder Zach Rattner, both of whom were former engineers in Qualcomm’s innovation department, specializing in writing code for artificial intelligence. By 2018, the startup employed seven people and a few dozen customers lining up on a waitlist to use their moving tool.

But Mohan said Yembo’s AI app surged in demand during 2020, as more and more companies saw a need for a remote surveying tool.

“People didn’t want strangers in their home, so it all went into virtual,” Mohan said. “We saw a (fivefold) growth in adoption.”

The company now has about 100 moving companies using its tool and employs 28 people. The startup is earning revenue, but not yet profitable.

Yembo’s new $8.5 million Series A round was led by Imagen Capital Partners, a Seattle-area investment firm.

“We believe the market will continue to seek cutting-edge solutions focused on efficient interior claims processing, while also underwriting (decision-making) and Yembo’s current technology can seamlessly shift to support these carrier demands,” said Chris Barrow, general partner with Imagen Capital Partners, in a statement. “The company’s vast domain expertise within the field of 3D computer vision and cloud computing has already deployed a powerful solution for the moving and relocation market, and we are excited to collaborate with and support the team as they extend their business model across the insurance sector.”