Founded in 2018, Sprout.ai has developed AI-based software that it says enables insurance claims to be settled within “just 24 hours”. Specifically, it uses natural language processing and optical character recognition to understand unstructured insurance claim data, and then combines this with real-time external data such as weather, geolocation, business and medication information, to automate claims or escalate them for further human analysis.
“Our mission is to enable insurers to pay out successful claims inside 24 hours,” Sprout.ai co-founder and CEO Niels Thone tells me. “Currently the average claims settlement time in the U.K. is 25 days. This is mainly caused by a lack of information at the start of the claims journey and a lot of manual touch points throughout the journey. This causes two problems: bad customer experiences and high operational costs for claims teams”.
To remedy this, insurance companies can plug their existing systems into Sprout.ai’s “Contextual AI” solution, which provides what Thone says is a much more complete data capture at the start of the claims process, and then is able to automatically validate incoming claims and predict the next necessary steps in the process.
This sees the big bulk of claims sent straight through for processing, resulting in them being settled in record time. “This way claim handlers only have to focus on the really complex claims, where their specialized skill set is actually needed,” says the Sprout.ai CEO.
“The secret lies in accessing the underlying unstructured data, such as pdfs, images, documents, etc.,” he adds. “This is where all the actual ‘data gold’ or, as we call it, ‘data sprouts’ lie, so it’s pertinent that you have the means to extract and structure this data as well as leverage it for further claims verification. Sprout.ai has developed proprietary algorithms in both the OCR and NLP fields to enable very accurate and fast extraction of this underlying data”.
Asked about Sprout.ai’s revenue model, Thone says the insurtech operates via a transactional model, whereby it charges a fee per claim processed. “The fee is volume dependent, which means that the more claims we process for a client, the cheaper the price per claim becomes,” he explains.
Meanwhile, Sprout.ai, which was previously called BlockClaim, says it will use the investment to further build out its data science and engineering team, and expand its sales operations. The U.K. startup is also making plans for U.S. expansion.