The Rise of Innovation

Insurance giants have long hoped to bring more innovation into their business, but strict regulations and long-standing processes have hindered their progress. This trend has slowly started to change as more investments in technology continue to increase. According to CB Insights, “more than $4.15B was deployed into insurance tech startups globally” with that number continuing to rise. But with so many startups continuously popping up, how can we differentiate from those that are fads and those that are worth our time? 

Here are 10 startups that are making promising changes in the industry.

1. Lazarus AI

By using EHR records and AI, Lazarus improves the early detection of cervical, skin, and ovarian cancer. This reduces the mortality rate to sub 4%, compared to the current mortality rate of 40% of cancers across the board. This also reduces costs for treatment by over 10x. 

2. Relay

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Relay is a next-generation reinsurance collaboration platform that helps carriers better manage and place reinsurance. Relay accelerates the placement process, eliminate redundant efforts, and alert you to the latest placement opportunities and trends. Packaged into the best user experience in reinsurance.

3. Halos

Halos, founded by Satadru Sengupta (previously GM of Insurance at DataRobot), is aimed at redefining the insurance policyholder experience. Their first product, Dobby, provides homeowners with an app to seamlessly request and manage their home maintenance needs. 

4. Spot

Spot is an ambitious startup entering the insurance industry by opening an entirely new channel of distribution and targeting those living an active and adventurous lifestyle. Spot makes it possible for people to purchase short-term, month-to-month policies, at an approachable price through a simple platform. 

5. Sorcero

Sorcero provides a Natural Language Processing (NLP) Platform for domain specific AI that understands Life Sciences, Insurance and related subject matter areas. The applications built on their platform focused on the most valuable functions at a technical enterprise, augmenting the subject matter experts in tedious workflows with vast amounts of unstructured data. Their platform is flexible and can be used for things such as personalized property loss recommendations, or agent and broker workflows to deliver for personalized offerings.

6. Zesty AI

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Zesty harnesses the power of Artificial Intelligence to change the way the trillion-dollar property insurance industry is assessing risk. They use the latest advancements in computer vision and deep learning on 115+Bn data points on residential and commercial properties to extract key building features to accurately model the potential impact of both non-catastrophic and catastrophic loss events. Insurance carriers and reinsurers have partnered with Zesty to underwrite risk more accurately, provide their customers a smoother purchasing experience and manage inspections more cost-effectively.

7. Attestiv

Attestiv is founded by serial entrepreneurs who have built and exits two enterprise SaaS startups prior to Attestiv. They are now tackling the growing impact of deepfake videos, tampered photos, and manipulated audio on our society. By using distributed ledgers, proprietary deep learning models, and Enterprise workflows/security, Attestiv plans to target the insurance industry as their beachhead market. Attestiv validates the authenticity of photos and videos from the point of capture to any time thereafter, with patent-pending inline validation, for applications in media insurance, faster and cheaper claims processing, underwriting, and inspections. 

8. Flock

Flock provides the world's most advanced real-time quantified risk assessment of drone flight risk.  They are a London-based, VC- and Government-backed insurtech startup, pioneering the use of Big Data to intelligently price insurance. Flock has formed a global partnership with Allianz, the world's largest aviation insurer, to launch their first product 'Flock Cover': a pay-as-you-fly insurance and safety app for drone pilots.

9. Esusu

Esusu is a venture-backed fintech company that builds digital tools and services designed to help people improve their financial resiliency and establish robust financial identities. The company specializes in capturing consumer data related to rental payments and peer-to-peer payments. 

Esusu does two things with this data:

1. It uses the data points to calculate financial risk profiles for individuals who are marginalized or “credit invisible”
2. It shares the data with major credit bureaus, lenders and governments to facilitate better decision making with respect to credit scores, loan arrangements, and economic policy formulation.

10. Surround

Surround is designing innovative insurance products that better serve modern consumers. The Company’s mission is to give its members the confidence to change the world through technology-powered insurance. It provides simple yet complete protection designed for how people actually live their lives and think about risk. Surround launched its initial subscription product for urban professionals in 2019.

At Plug and Play’s Insurtech accelerator we match large corporations with top-tier startups that are changing the future of the insurance industry. Join our platform today.