London-based insurtech Sprout.ai, a claims automation and fraud detection company, has raised £8M (approx €9.27M) in its Series A round of funding. The round was led by early-stage investor Octopus Ventures. In addition, the round also saw participation from existing investors Amadeus Capital Partners, Playfair Capital, and Techstars.
Future of insurance
Founded in 2018 by Niels Thone and Raphael Guth, Sprout.ai was founded on the belief that Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to unlock the future of insurance, solving fraud detection, and claims automation, while empowering insurers to deliver amazing customer experiences.
Sprout provides software suite for personal and commercial insurers. It provides software for claims management and fraud detection. In addition, the company also offers solutions for image analysis, audio analysis, document management, behaviour analysis, and more.
The engine provides global insurers, such as Zurich – an insurer company, with a product that solves their claim workflow problems with AI techniques such as Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Optical Character Recognition (OCR).
These technologies enable Sprout.ai’s proprietary engine to read, contextualise and action insurance claims with speed and accuracy in decision-making. The company claims its document processing has been developed specifically for the insurance sector to deal with raw document variations, such as handwritten doctors’ notes.
Niels Thoné, CEO of Sprout.ai, commented, “Sprout.ai’s mission is to revolutionise customer service within global claims automation. Our innovative and industry-leading AI claims engine is poised to solve the current market inefficiencies, allowing insurers to focus on customers in their moments of need.”
“Explainable AI”
Sprout.ai contextualises their findings to understand what information has been extracted, allowing the proprietary AI engine to provide what it calls “Explainable AI” to its users. This gives clear reasoning and full transparency as to why a certain ‘next best step’ recommendation has been delivered at every step of the claim journey.
Sprout.ai reduces the time taken to process individual claims from 30 days to just 24 hours. This time saving process has helped the company attract attention from a number of large insurers across the world, including Zurich – a multi-line insurer company, where the demand is increasing since the pandemic began.
The company currently offers services across three continents, including Europe, South America, and APAC.
Will Paskins, Head of Claims Digital Experience at Zurich, says, “When a claim occurs, customers expect fast, clear, and transparent handling of their claims, and by partnering with Sprout we are able to provide them with market-leading technology.”
Paskins adds, “Sprout.ai’s passion for improving customer outcomes and endless innovation makes them a partner we are proud to be associated with, and we look forward to working with them as they scale.”
How will the funds be utilised?
With the increasing demands, Sprout.ai will use the capital to increase headcounts, with plans to recruit top talent into its product, delivery, operations, and technical teams, while growing its enterprise sales and partner networks. The company says this will make their customers receive the solution in as fast time as possible by accelerating pipeline deployment and customer onboarding.
The funds will also be used to invest in R&D, focusing particularly on OCR and NLP, in order to reinforce its position as the market-leading solution for claims automation.
Thoné adds, “We’ve already seen exceptional levels of interest from global insurers in the last 12 months, who are increasingly looking to automate their claims journey. This funding will allow us to keep scaling to meet that demand.”
