Omri Stern
Co-founder and CEO at Jones
Omri Stern says true success doesn’t just mean creating a software solution to the archaic, disorganized challenge of insurance compliance. It means setting the gold standard in the field.
Yet that ambition was born from a more humble perspective: a personal inclination, in Stern’s words, toward solving “dusty, boring problems.”
Tracking compliance for certificates of insurance, or COIs, certainly fits the dusty, boring bill. There are many cogs that make the great machine of commercial real estate churn to life, from purchasing to renovation to leasing to maintenance to much more. There are tens of thousands of vendors that help owners and developers handle these tasks, but each comes with its own complex web of risk and liability.
“Insurance verification has a purpose,” Stern said. “If there is an accident, having that level of protection for the building, the subcontractor, the vendor, is really important. But the process of verifying insurance, people couldn’t care less about. For decades, [companies] have just been addressing it with email, spreadsheets, broken workflows. It just doesn’t work.”
Jones is the result of Stern’s realization that opportunity existed within that inefficiency. While Jones started life as an insurance-tracking software provider, it has since evolved into a network of more than 50,000 vendors and subcontractors, each with verified insurance data that is analyzed by AI and made available to network subscribers.
To Stern, that data is the future of Jones and the future of COI compliance in general.
“We made a bet that if you have one database for insurance, where any real estate owner or construction manager can have access to it, they would be able to almost instantly speed up the process to approval and transfer risk in a powerful way,” Stern said.
“It used to be a world where you had to collect an insurance certificate five times a year, from each vendor, on each property, all via email and tracked with spreadsheets,” he added. “And now it’s just all in the cloud on one database, and one out of five vendors can be found there. We’re building a data-driven standard for the industry.”
