AJ
Altman

The Story

Blueprints, Bullets, and 3D Models

Today, when a roofing contractor in Ohio wants to price a job, they don't climb a ladder and pace off measurements. They pull out a phone, shoot a handful of photos, and Hover's platform returns a precise 3D model of the home - complete with measurements, material estimates, and a homeowner-ready proposal. The contractor moves from site visit to signed contract in minutes, not days.

That platform traces back to a decision AJ Altman made at 29. He had spent four years at Intel working on consumer product marketing and market strategy after earning a computer engineering degree from Notre Dame. Then he walked away from it and enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps as an infantry officer.

This is not a common career move. Most Intel engineers do not subsequently deploy to Iraq. But Altman did, and the military exposed him to geospatial mapping technology being used to generate 3D terrain models for troops on the ground. He filed that idea away.

When Altman left the Marines in 2011, he co-founded Hover with Ross Hangebrauck. The insight was straightforward: construction was one of the last major industries without a digital measurement layer. A roof measurement required a person on a ladder with a tape measure. An insurance adjustment meant a claims adjuster making a physical visit. The entire process was slow, expensive, and ripe for automation.

The solution Altman built was the kind of thing that sounds obvious in hindsight. Point a smartphone at a house. Hover's computer vision and machine learning algorithms extract precise measurements - walls, roof planes, windows, doors - and generate a detailed 3D model. No ladder. No clipboard. No third visit to catch the missed dormer.

Funding History

Building the Runway

The backers tell a story. Hover's Series B in January 2018 brought in GV (Google Ventures) and, notably, The Home Depot - a retailer that processes tens of thousands of home renovation transactions daily. The message: Hover's data layer was already essential infrastructure for the built environment.

By the 2020 Series D, the investor list had shifted toward insurance. Travelers, State Farm Ventures, and Nationwide led the $60M round. Three of America's largest property-casualty insurers writing a check for a 3D property intelligence company is a vote of confidence that goes well beyond software. It suggests these carriers are betting Hover's data will become central to how claims are filed, adjusted, and settled.

The round valued Hover at $490M post-money. Altman had grown the company from $1M in revenue in 2016 to a $70M annual run rate by 2020 - a trajectory that made the valuation look measured rather than speculative.

Origin

What a Marine Sees That an Engineer Misses

GV's writeup on Altman was titled "How a U.S. Marine Built HOVER to Recreate Homes in 3D" - and there's a specificity to that framing that matters. Military mapping technology in the early 2000s had to work in the field, on limited hardware, with imperfect data. It had to be correct. Property measurements have the same constraint: if Hover's 3D model is two inches off, the material order is wrong and the contractor eats the difference.

Altman has spoken about the Marine Corps shaping his approach to leadership - the clarity of mission, the discipline of execution, the attention to what actually works under pressure. These are not traits incidental to Hover's success. At 450 employees with investors ranging from Google to Nationwide, the organizational challenge is as demanding as the technical one.

Product

From Measurement Tool to Operating System for the Built Environment

In its early years, Hover was a measurement company. Take photos, get dimensions. That was the product. But measurement is just the first data point in a renovation workflow that spans design inspiration, material selection, cost estimation, contractor proposal, homeowner approval, and insurance documentation.

Altman built toward that full stack. In February 2025, Hover launched Instant Design - an AI tool that takes a single photo of a home and generates photo-realistic renovations in multiple design styles within seconds. No design background required. A homeowner sees their house in James Hardie siding before a single nail is pulled.

Then in January 2026, Hover launched what Altman called the connected visual platform - a system that unifies measurements, design, automated estimates, and homeowner-ready proposals in one place. Contractors who previously juggled five separate apps - one for measurements, one for design, one for estimating, one for proposals, one for documentation - now run the entire workflow from a single interface. "Pros can move from scope to sale in minutes, not days," Altman said at the launch.

The platform includes 1,000+ integrations with material suppliers, insurance carriers, and workflow tools. Hover was named the #15 Preferred Strategic Partner in the Nation for 2026 by Power100, a ranking that reflects adoption across the roofing and home improvement industry.

Vision

Every Property on Earth, in 3D

Altman has articulated a goal that puts Hover's current product in context: to digitally reconstruct a 3D model for every physical property on the planet. It is the kind of ambition that sounds like a press release until you consider the trajectory. Hover started with roofs. It expanded to full exteriors, then interiors. It now handles insurance claims, contractor workflows, homeowner design tools, and material ordering.

The logic is geographic. Every residential and commercial property on Earth has measurements. Most of those measurements have never been recorded digitally. The construction industry runs on tape measures, hand-drawn sketches, and contractors who have memorized how to eyeball a hip roof pitch. Hover's platform proposes to replace all of that with structured, machine-readable 3D data.

Insurance is where that vision becomes commercially urgent. After a hurricane, a wildfire, or a hailstorm, claims adjusters are dispatched to tens of thousands of properties. Hover's technology allows those claims to be processed remotely, from existing property records or freshly captured photos. During COVID-19, when in-person visits were restricted, Altman described significant acceleration in adoption: "As a product that eliminates the need for on-site home visits, we've seen growth and adoption of our technology over the past several months to enable more remote selling and desk adjusting."

Hover has remained an independent company throughout, despite the scale of its insurance-sector partnerships. "We are a standalone company," Altman said in 2020. "We have partnerships across the insurance ecosystem and are always looking for new relationships that will help us to improve the policyholder experience." That independence gives Hover the flexibility to serve multiple insurers simultaneously - an advantage it would lose as a subsidiary.

In His Own Words

Straight from the Source

Career Arc

Timeline

Watch

AJ Altman on Video

How a U.S. Marine Built HOVER to Recreate Homes in 3D (GV, 2021)

Attracting More Vets into Tech - Veterans Day Conversation with AJ Altman (2021)

Hover CEO AJ Altman: "Wouldn't Be Surprised If We Hit $50M This Year" (2019)

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Links & Resources