After a disaster like a hurricane, flood, or fire ravages a building, someone’s gotta clean it up.
That’s why insurance companies bring in a disaster restoration subcontractor, who use professional-grade climate control equipment like dehumidifiers, heaters, and air movers to dry an environment so property owners can get their building back.
But the lack of transparency between the three parties–insurance companies, subcontractors, and property owners–creates an “effectively adversarial relationship,” said Kevin Dooley, co-founder and CEO of Ottawa-based Kahi.
“I think now is the time where, if we don’t really put a concerted effort in taking it, it could supplant us to somebody else.”
Kevin Dooley
Kahi CEO
Spun out of Dooley’s restoration subcontracting company Drysource in 2020, Kahi produces internet-of-things (IoT) disaster tech sensors that track and manage the climate control equipment used by restoration subcontractors on its platform. Dooley bootstrapped Kahi for a few years alongside co-founders Marc Lennox, Meghan Dagenais, and Chris Wise, but recently raised a $2.3 million CAD seed round led by BDC Capital Seed Venture Fund. Now, Kahi plans to add an analytics component that aims to reign in the often inconsistent pricing and methodology of disaster restoration contractors.
“The insurance company wants to pay the least amount. The person that owns the building just wants to get their building back, what they had, and sometimes they want to get back more than they deserve,” Dooley explained in an exclusive interview with BetaKit. “Then you have this contractor trying to make as much [money] as often as they can.”
Dooley knows this relationship well, and he’s hoping Kahi can bring much-needed transparency to the process. He’s a “second generation restoration guy” having grown up working at his father’s own business and, as he reluctantly describes, has become a “figure in the space” himself.
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Kahi’s sensors will prescribe multiple ways an environment can be dried, including the “best” and “most efficient” possibilities, helping insurance companies get some predictability across their supply chain.
“It gives all stakeholders full visibility into the best to worst [methods], and also the expected time frame,” Dooley said. “Once they choose whatever method they’re using, we can then validate it as it’s occurring to help the service provider stay on track [and] also provide all that data to the other parties to trust that the service provider is actually doing the right thing.”
Even though Drysource is now a distinctly separate entity from Kahi, Dooley said his two companies are complementary to each other. The duo provides space for product ideation, product testing, and “some level of innovation” by testing Kahi’s tech in the field before deploying to its customer.
The all-equity round, which closed in April, also featured participation from a strategic investor that Dooley declined to disclose, but called them a “disaster restoration industry veteran.” Dooley said the funding will be used to increase the company’s headcount in both sales and research and development, aiming to grow the company from 20 employees to approximately 35 employees by the end of 2025.
“We see an opportunity to position ourselves as the de facto service provider and, in some aspects, become a standard part of how you operate in the [disaster restoration] space,” Dooley said. “I think now is the time where, if we don’t really put a concerted effort in taking it, it could supplant us to somebody else.”
Kahi is currently using a “guerilla grassroots” approach to move its product and grow sales into the new year, Dooley said, leveraging his own visibility in the space and Drysource’s network of contractors across the United States and Canada to propel the business. As for the name ‘Kahi?’ Dooley was just keeping it simple.
“It’s a Hawaiian word that means ‘one place,’” he explained. “[In the] early days it made a lot of sense in terms of what we were initially going to market with and what we do.”
“It was also a simple, short word that we could get the URL for,” Dooley added with a chuckle.
Feature image courtesy Kahi.