6 insurtechs at the forefront of emerging technologies

December 5, 2023 6:02 AM

Instanda

Rather than addressing P&C insurance technology issues in conventional ways, to assess risks, price premiums and provide quotes, INSTANDA founder and CEO Tim Hardcastle took a page out of Steve Jobs' Apple playbook and developed a service no one asked for, but didn't realize they needed. That service is a customizable insurance solution that lives in the cloud for MGAs and carriers and improves algorithmic risk assessments.

"We essentially put the technology into the hands of the people that are running those particular insurance lines as products," said Hardcastle. "We give them the power to design, build, manage, enhance and run their portfolios of products." The solution lets users apply any algorithm to sort risk profiles, to select ones the insurer is willing to underwrite. INSTANDA can clean data on the front end, on its way into an algorithm.

Re

In a difficult reinsurance market, Re launched this year offering a blockchain-based technology to cover a wide range of risks with reinsurance. The startup insurtech, led by CEO and co-founder Karn Saroya, began development in 2020 at Cover, a car and home insurance insurtech he had co-founded in 2016.

Re uses Avalanche, a smart contracts blockchain platform, as a protocol to handle accounting, applying it to underwriting decisions, explained Saroya. With it, Re users can operate like "reinsurance MGAs," he said.

Its technology "memorializes" data in Avalanche to use for underwriting and pricing decisions, according to Saroya. With Re's platform, an underwriter can "assess the business and put up their hand, like a syndicate at Lloyd's, supply capital to that deal, and have the protocol come in behind it to supply the rest of the capital that's necessary to back a deal," he said.

Roots Automation

Roots Automation, a new insurtech, refers to its software as a 'digital co-worker.' The company pitches its product, which can perform a number of insurance tasks, as a solution to talent scarcity and as an alternative to robotic process automation across the insurance value chain – with applications for carriers, third-party claims administrators, brokers and agents alike.

"When we talk about a digital co-worker, we're really talking about a piece of software AI that can act as an underwriting or a claims assistant for an insurance company," says Chaz Perera, CEO and co-founder of Roots Automation.

Percipience

As the data landscape continuously expands, some insurers are opting to migrate their core systems to the cloud for more efficient data storage and retrieval. Legacy data solutions are often not architected to exist on a public cloud, however, which creates a challenge for effective data management as companies deal with the complexity of data integration from diverse sources.

Founded by Bruce Broussard and Ajay Kelshiker, Percipience, an insurtech data and analytics software provider, offers its Data Magnifier platform to address the challenges associated with siloed and disparate data sources. The platform, which includes comprehensive data integration, management and reporting via the cloud or other database platforms, converts isolated data from various sources and enables complete autonomy over the solution's implementation.

NeuralMetrics

For small businesses looking for insurance underwriting, it can sometimes become difficult to use major carriers if those carriers don't have a readily available way to get that business' risk profile.

Founded in 2018, NeuralMetrics, an insurtech that uses AI to evaluate the risk of businesses seeking coverage, serves a few tier one carriers and a few more tier two and three carriers. The company feeds structured and unstructured publicly available data into its AI technology to produce profiles of carriers' small business clients, according to Prakash Vasant, CEO and co-founder of NeuralMetrics.

"When you're looking at unstructured data, it could be anywhere – from corporate websites, Facebook, social media – that we could bring in. Structured data is from government sites, like OSHA violations or the liquor license or the permits and things like that. So it brings in both," he said. "When we bring in both the structured and unstructured data together, we could now give you a complete profile of that particular business."

Levlr

Jeff Diem, a Denver-based restoration contracting estimator, often encountered gaps between contractors' estimates and insurance company adjusters' estimates to repair residential property damage. Reconciliation of estimates became a constant burden for Diem as owner and founder of Elkmont Estimates, which writes estimates for contractors to help get those estimates approved by insurance carriers.

"We noticed that our clients were asking us time and time again to compare and reconcile these estimates," he said. On average, residential damage restoration contractors may spend about 80 hours per month on these reconciliations, Diem added.

Instead of hiring more staff to find and process the discrepancies, last year Diem founded Levlr, which provides software to automatically reconcile discrepancies in the estimates.

"It compares these two documents using machine learning," Diem said. "It will show the user everything that's been changed or modified or removed." Levlr can send questions on discrepancies back to the contractor to review. This reduces the time needed to check estimates and increases their accuracy, according to Diem. The software is also useful for other vested interests in handling property damage claims.