AI-powered insuretech platform i3systems raises $1 M from Unitus Ventures and others
On Wednesday, Mumbai-based i3systems announced that it has raised $1 million in investment from impact venture fund Unitus Ventures. Further, angel investors Behram Vakil, Founding Partner of AZB Partners and Jerxis Vandrevala, Founder of Sanchez Computers Inc. and Zenta also participated in this investment round.
According to the company, the investment will be used to grow their data team and deepen and develop their technology.
An AI product company, i3systems builds automation products for the health and life insurance sector. Its AI systems implement data-centric processes that completely transform the way policies are underwritten and claims are settled.
Its first product, called DataMD, performs underwriting process-automation, execution of medical rule engines, and ultimately fraud detection.
Speaking on the occasion, Mallesh Bommanahal, CEO of i3systems, said,
“Unitus' funding will enable us to grow our medical data science team to increase the depth of our diagnostic-risk and secondary care evaluation technology. We are also setting up a dedicated customer success team to execute 10 insurance partnerships in India and abroad."
While, Srikrishna Ramamoorthy, Partner at Unitus Ventures, added,
We first met i3systems through our StartHealth competition. What resonated well with us was how their medical data science and natural language processing technologies' could transform India's microinsurance industry. This was very aligned with Mallesh and Varzavand's vision for the business and led us to invest in them.
According to i3systems, in India’s health insurance industry, decisions are based purely on manual judgement by browsing nearly 50-100 page scans of medical documents for correlating more than 50 data points.
This causes underwriting and claim processing to be prone to errors, inconsistent judgement, lacking in audit trails, leakage and fraud.
This results in two disadvantages; i3systems states that due to these leakages in underwriting and claims processing, insurance companies typically suffer 15 percent underwriting losses compared to the premium collected.
Two, this further results in lack of interest in micro-insurance or low-ticket insurance products eliminating customers with lower spending potential completely.
The company states that through its platform i3systems’ platform 60 percent of the policy underwriting can be automated and the turnaround time for a claim settlement is reduced to 30 minutes from more than 10 days currently.
Speaking on the announcement, Jerxis Vandrevala, Founder of Sanchez Computers Inc. and Zenta, said,
Having worked in the IT sector for more than two decades, I was attracted to i3systems’ business model… lean on overheads and more on products that are developed around AI capabilities. In less than a year, these products have already had a sizeable impact on the insurance industry and in the years to come they will only bring about significant changes in the way this sector is run.
The firm's DataMD product has analysed more than two million diagnostic reports and has predicted health risk for over 100,000 policies already.
In the next 12 months, i3systems is working to partner with India's top 20 life and health insurance companies and increase the reach of its products to one million policies and one million mediclaims.