London-based insurtech Sprout.ai that assures to settle insurance claims process in just 24 hours has now announced to have bagged £8 million in Series A funding.
The investment round was led by Octopus Ventures, one of the largest and most active early-stage investors in Europe. Even existing investors, including Amadeus Capital Partners, Techstars and Playfair Capital, also participated in the round.
Sprout.ai will use the investment to support hiring and plans to recruit top talent into its product, operations, delivery, and technical teams. Also, it intends to grow its enterprise sales and partner networks. Apparently, the insurtech company intends to make sure that customers can receive the solution quickly by accelerating pipeline deployment and customer onboarding. Sprout.ai also announced that it would use the investment in R&D with an increased focus on OCR and NLP. This way, it aims to grab the position of segment leader in claims automation.
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 the engine is poised to solve the current market inefficiencies, allowing insurers to focus on customers in their moments of need. This funding will allow us to keep scaling to meet that demand.”
Nick Sando, the early-stage fintech investor at Octopus Ventures, said: “We are often at our most vulnerable when we submit insurance claims, and it doesn’t help when we then have to wait another month for it to be processed. Sprout.ai empowers insurers to process claims in a fraction of the time, creating much better outcomes for customers when they need it most. This is clearly good news for insurers too. Not only should they have much happier customers, but it also has the potential to create huge efficiencies, significantly reducing their operational expenses. That’s why the opportunity for Sprout.ai is so great. It is tackling a big problem in an enormous global market and the technology that Niels and his team have built is the best we’ve ever seen in this space.”
Amelia Armour, Partner, Amadeus Capital Partners, added: “Sprout.ai’s technology has gained traction fast since we made our seed investment. The company’s product development in document reading and natural language processing has been impressive. We’re delighted to continue to support the team.”
Advanced claims automation solution
Founded by Raphael Guth in 2018, Sprout.ai is an advanced claims automation solution that harnesses the power of Contextual AI to revolutionise the insurance claims experience for global insurers and their consumers alike. It provides global insurers such as Zurich with a product that solves their claim workflow problems with state-of-the-art 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. It significantly improves speed and accuracy in decision-making. Its document processing has been developed for the insurance sector to deal with hundreds of raw document variations such as handwritten doctors’ notes. Its proprietary Intelligent OCR is best in its class, specialised in working with unstructured and handwritten data.
Its proprietary AI engine provides 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.
Will Paskins, Head of Claims Digital Experience at Zurich, said: “At Zurich we are constantly looking for innovative ways to enhance a customer’s experience when a claim occurs. Customers expect fast, clear and transparent handling of their claims and by partnering with Sprout not only are we helping meet this expectation for our customers, but importantly supporting our staff too by providing them with market-leading technology.”