Verdex Uses Satellites to Settle Crop Insurance Claims From a Desk

The Macro: Crop Insurance Adjusters Drive Millions of Miles to Look at Fields

Crop insurance is a $20 billion market in the US. When a farmer files a claim because drought, flooding, or hail damaged their crops, an adjuster has to go verify the damage. This means driving to the farm, walking the fields, taking measurements, and filing a report. The process takes days per claim and costs hundreds of dollars per inspection.

The absurdity of this should be obvious. We have satellites orbiting the earth that can photograph individual plants from space. High-resolution satellite imagery is cheaper and more available than ever. Planet Labs alone captures the entire earth’s surface every day. Yet crop insurance verification still requires a human being in a truck driving to a cornfield in Nebraska.

The reason for this gap is not technology. It is trust. Insurers need to be confident that the satellite-based assessment is at least as accurate as a human adjuster. The models need to understand crop health, damage patterns, and yield impact from aerial imagery. That is a hard technical problem, but it is solvable. And the economic incentive to solve it is enormous.

The Micro: Dartmouth Grads Insuring 11% of American Farmland

Jad Bousselham and Evan Rankin founded Verdex. Jad has a Math and CS degree from Dartmouth and created soybean yield prediction models using satellite imagery during college. Evan is also a Dartmouth grad. They are a two-person team from San Francisco, part of YC Winter 2026 with Jon Xu.

The product replaces manual field inspections with real-time digital audits using high-resolution satellite imagery. Insurers can verify and settle claims without ever leaving their desks. The results speak for themselves: Verdex currently helps insure over 11% of all American farmland, working with major crop insurers managing 100+ million acres.

That is remarkable traction for a two-person startup. 11% of American farmland is not a pilot program. It is a meaningful share of the market, and it means the technology has passed the accuracy threshold that insurers require.

The company positions itself around “ground truth for smarter insurance decisions.” The underlying technology combines satellite image analysis with crop-specific models that understand growth patterns, damage signatures, and yield predictions. The models get better as they process more claims data, creating a feedback loop between satellite observations and actual claim outcomes.

The Verdict

Verdex has already proven product-market fit. You do not get to 11% of American farmland without delivering real value to real insurance companies. The question is how fast they can expand from crop insurance into other lines, and how much of the crop market they can capture.

The competitive risk comes from established ag-tech companies like Indigo Agriculture and Climate Corporation, as well as satellite analytics companies like Descartes Labs and Planet Labs that could move into insurance verification. But Verdex’s insurance-specific models and existing insurer relationships give them a meaningful head start.

In 30 days, I want to see claim accuracy rates compared to traditional field inspections. In 60 days, the question is whether Verdex is expanding into other agricultural insurance products like livestock or equipment. In 90 days, I want to know about international expansion. Crop insurance markets exist globally, and satellite imagery does not care about borders.