New Investment: Zelros, transforming insurance IT infrastructures into machine learning powerhouses

We are excited to be backing Zelros in its €11M Series A funding, alongside Benhamou Global Ventures, Hi Innov, 42 Cap and Astorya.vc. Zelros offers a cloud-based solution to help insurers leverage AI and better serve their customers.

Why is customer experience so depersonalized in insurance, despite vast access to customer data?

Data is being continuously collected throughout the lifetimes of insurers’ customers. Hence, these companies are sitting on a trove of potentially valuable data, but do not have the capabilities to leverage it. Most of the insurance industry has not come up with a way to efficiently collect, structure, organize and leverage this information. It leads to many silos of unstructured information scattered across the organization.

Insurers are very much aware of the importance of leveraging AI and machine learning to improve their business, but data often comes as a major hurdle. Therefore, there is a duality whereby insurers seem to have access to large amounts of data but struggle to leverage AI and machine learning because of a lack of data to feed models. When the management and recording of data are disorganized, flowing towards different systems of intelligence, incumbents are missing the link to drive business value.

Eventually, this incapacity to properly leverage data at scale represents serious opportunity costs to insurers and strategic disadvantages against digitally-driven challengers. Underwriting and new product development remains a slow process and can become an impossible task for some of the emerging or rapidly changing risks. Risk portfolio management remains a static activity, even though it has so much potential to rely on dynamic information flows and become the starting point for services beyond insurance. Distribution, products, and customer experience are hardly personalized by lack of customer understanding, leaving a highway open for comparison platforms. While claims management is seen as the value-chain item with the deepest use of data and AI, there is still a lot of margin to reducing fraud and smoothing customer experience.

Zelros: A cloud-based solution to help insurers leverage AI

Zelros is tackling these problems by providing a cloud-based solution to help insurers leverage AI. It empowers organizations to manage, store, organize, exploit their data, and drive higher ROI towards their customer-facing activities. Zelros has built a unique AI platform dedicated to the insurance industry that supports the centralization of structured and unstructured data (voice, image, free text) across the organization.

It first collects and stores data from different sources (contracts, external data, claims, etc.) and then structures them under the same standard data model. The AI engine built with insurance know-how from the ground up provides recommendations and automation opportunities to the insurance professionals, helping them achieve the best outcomes for their customers. The platform also ensures transparency in the data sources and high algorithm explainability.

We are very proud to be backing an exceptional team of 45 tech experts, led by a seasoned founding team with strong insurance and enterprise infrastructure experience. Christophe, Fabien and Damien combine deep expertise in enterprise software and data science with a solid background in creating and growing technology businesses.

We share the team's vision that future leading insurance players will be first and foremost technology companies, offering an outstanding customer experience. But this vision requires tremendous efforts from the incumbents to transform their data and analytics infrastructures. These transformations also require making sure that they fit real business and customers' needs. Zelros' products are specifically built to solve these challenges efficiently and with the most advanced technological standards.

We are extremely thrilled to welcome Zelros into the Plug and Play family and look forward to working closely together towards more data-driven insurance industry.

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