Meet the insurtech: Roadzen

Roadzen CEO Rohan Malhotra had an epiphany.

A personal experience dealing with an auto accident claim led Malhotra, who has master's in robotics from Carnegie Mellon, to start the company. 

He had been working on AI products since 2010. After midnight one evening in 2015 in New Delhi, after dinner with a friend, he saw the friend get in a head-on collision. Malhotra sent the friend, who turned out to be unharmed, in another car to the hospital, and remained at the scene to deal with the aftermath.

"I tried to get his claim filed, get a tow truck to pick up the vehicle and take it to a garage," he said. "It took me about four and a half hours of standing on the road and making calls for about four to five hours trying to get all of this arranged. What struck me was that this is a world where everything is on demand. … But I've paid my insurer for this and I'm sitting there making phone calls, literally on the side of the road. And it doesn't feel right. That experience was actually so bad that I was thinking about how to make it better and use technology to make it better." 

Malhotra founded Roadzen that year in India with five people. The startup insurtech began by considering how to better underwrite and distribute insurance, so that claims are processed in real time. Roadzen works with insurers, car manufacturers and fleets, acting as a broker or MGA, to price and sell insurance, and process claims. 

"Everybody likes to sell insurance, but they sell it and then they forget about the customer. Then it takes six weeks to process a claim," Malhotra said. "We began with the opposite approach. It's how can we build the best claims experience for the customer, and then move backwards from that."

Roadzen gets a jump on filing claims through AI technology, according to Malhotra. "Just as your phone can tell you how many steps you've walked in a day, we can actually predict if your car has been in an accident, using an accident-detection AI algorithm," he said. "Then we send you a link where you can video the accident location. In real time, we can recognize which parts of the vehicle are damaged using computer vision and give you a claim estimate within less than two minutes."

In addition, Roadzen applies AI to functions beyond claims. The company's technology includes road safety functions, such as monitoring for distractions. "If a driver is falling asleep, or his car is about to be in an accident, we can actually recognize and prevent that from happening," Malhotra said. 

Roadzen's AI can work with telematics data to price policies, rather than relying on standard location and demographic data. "It should lead to lower premiums for good drivers, but also coach bad drivers to become good drivers," Malhotra said. 

Roadzen has since become global with 400 staff members and offices in New York, San Francisco, London, Paris, New Delhi, Chennai and Ahmedabad. A lot of the company's growth has happened in the past two years, according to Malhotra. Roadzen launched its IPO on September 22.