Insurance tech startup Zelros today announced that it raised $11 million in series A funding led by BGV. The company plans to use the capital to scale operations across Europe and expand into North America, a spokesperson told VentureBeat.
The insurance tech market is red hot. Online platform Next Insurance, which targets small business owners with a focus on specific niches, recently raised $250 million. In March 2019, Washington, D.C.-based workers’ compensation insurer Pie Insurance brought in $45 million, just a month after CoverHound nabbed $58 million. And in June 2020, Planck raised $16 million for its AI-powered commercial risk insurance platform.
For its part, Paris-based Zelros, which was founded in 2016, employs AI to provide advisors and policyholders with advice on choosing the right coverage for their needs. The platform ingests claims, quotes, voice calls, underwriting documents, and other kinds of data via connectors to cover tasks like claim handling and facilitate the deployment and monitoring of AI pipelines in production.
Zelros taps natural language understanding technology to capture information from voice conversations between policyholders and insurance advisors or contact center representatives. The platform surfaces contextualized recommendations in real time and at the end of customer calls, storing newly detected information to enrich customer relationship management databases. Meanwhile, Zelros’ computer vision system extracts key fields from insurance-specific documents, while a separate set of algorithms prioritizes products based on business priorities like revenue, number of subscriptions, and product mix.
Zelros can run simulations and A/B tests to analyze the business impacts of new AI settings. Insurers get profiles of customers drawn from their histories in the form of a summary of data and analyses based on predictions for answers to requests. These profiles can be used to implement learning paths for advisors and to define missions and business goals to be achieved.
Zelros claims to have seen two consecutive years of triple-digit revenue growth, with a customer base that’s grown to include 15 of the leading insurance providers in Europe across property and casualty and life insurance business lines. In 2020 alone, the company reviewed over 20 million policyholder-specific situations and issued over two million personalized recommendations.
“Digital transformation is fundamentally changing how businesses operate, and with insurtech funding reaching an all-time high of $7.1 billion in 2020, the insurance industry is no exception,” cofounder and CEO Christophe Bourguignat said in a press release. “At Zelros, we focus one hundred percent of our attention on developing res AI-driven technology to improve and advance the insurance industry. We’re passionate about helping insurance players transform into technology-first companies, and the support of BGV, Capgemini, and all of our investors will empower us to accomplish our mission.”
Beyond BGV, new investors ISAI Cap Venture and Plug and Play and previous investors HI INOV, 42CAP, and Astorya.vc also participated in Zelros’ funding round announced today. In Q3 2021, Zelros cofounder and COO Damien Philippon will relocate to Montreal and launch the company’s North American headquarters, which will employ five employees by the end of the year.
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