Planck Re, a 2016-founded startup aimed at simplifying commercial insurance underwriting, has secured $12 million in its Series A funding. The round was led by Arbor Ventures and includes Viola FinTech and Eight Roads.
Based in Tel Aviv, Planck Re’s technology mines, ingests, cleans, and updates large amounts of data from the web, using AI and machine learning to analyse the data before serving it to underwriters.
Planck Re says the end result is a frictionless underwriting process with greater insurance carrier visibility into risk factors, leading to improved conversion, retention and reduced loss ratios.
“Buying insurance in 2018 still involves endless questions filled by humans,” said Elad Tsur, Chief Executive Officer of Planck Re.
“In addition to it being a time-consuming and labor-intensive process, it’s also prone to errors. Emerging from two years of research and development, we resolved this by leveraging AI and Big Data technologies to provide answers to all required underwriting questions, with name and address being the only manual inputs.”
Planck Re plans to focus on the U.S. commercial insurance market initially. Based on pilots conducted with several top-tier U.S. insurance carriers, the platform reportedly managed to automatically and accurately complete over 90% of the fields in the onboarding questionnaires.
Lior Simon, Vice President and Head of Israel at Arbor Ventures commented, “We are excited to partner with Planck Re and the driven, entrepreneurial team.”
“Insurance companies are thirsty for actionable data, to assess risk, gain real time insights and enhance customer understanding. Planck Re aims to empower them through a streamlined digital approach, which we believe will truly alter the insurance industry.”
Tomer Michaeli, General Partner at Viola FinTech, added “We’re proud to have Planck Re as our first investment in the fund and to be a partner in their journey as they navigate in the complex task of cooperation with large financial institutions.
“We both share the vision of bridging the gap between insurance world and the start-up ecosystem and believe their solution would be transformational for the insurance industry.”
