5th May 2021 – London, UK: Sprout.ai, the insurtech that enables insurance claims to be settled within just 24 hours, today announced that it has raised £8m/$11m in Series A funding.
The round was led by one of Europe’s largest and most active early-stage investors, Octopus Ventures, and was joined by existing investors, Amadeus Capital Partners, Playfair Capital and Techstars.
Sprout.ai is an advanced claims automation solution harnessing the power of Contextual AI to revolutionise the insurance claims experience for global insurers and their consumers alike. The engine 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, significantly improving speed and accuracy in decision-making. Its document processing has been developed specifically for the insurance sector to deal with hundreds of raw document variations, such as handwritten doctors’ notes. Sprout.ai’s proprietary Intelligent OCR is best in its class, specialised in working with unstructured and handwritten data.
Sprout.ai contextualises their findings to understand what information has been extracted, allowing the proprietary AI engine to provide 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.
Sprout.ai is revolutionising the customer service offering in the insurance sphere, reducing the time taken to process individual claims from 30 days to just 24 hours. The huge time saving it offers has helped the company attract attention from a number of large insurers across the world including Zurich, with demand increasing significantly since the pandemic began. It now has deployments across three continents, including Europe, South America and APAC.
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.
The collaboration with Sprout.ai has been nothing short of brilliant. Their passion for improving customer outcomes and endless innovation makes them a partner we are proud to be associated with and we look forward to working with them as they scale.”
Sprout.ai is working relentlessly to meet product delivery demands following a strong and growing customer commitment for their solution. The funding will be used to support hiring, with plans to recruit top talent into its product, delivery, operations and technical teams, whilst growing its enterprise sales and partner networks. This will make sure that their customers can receive the solution in as fast time as possible by accelerating pipeline deployment and customer onboarding. Funding will also be used to invest in R&D, focusing particularly on OCR and NLP, in order to reinforce its position as the market-leading solution for 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 engine is poised to solve the current market inefficiencies, allowing insurers to focus on customers in their moments of need.
By combining document processing and contextualisation, we have created a vastly superior technical product, making us strongly placed as the market leader. We’ve already seen exceptional levels of interest from global insurers in the last 12 months, who are increasingly looking to automate their claims journey. This funding will allow us to keep scaling to meet that demand.”
Nick Sando, 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.”
Media contacts:
Sprout.ai
Lizzie Chisholm, Operations & Marketing Lead – e.chisholm@sprout.ai
Octopus Ventures
Sam Ferris, Communications Manager – sam.ferris@octopusinvestments.com / 020 3142 4933
About Sprout.ai
Sprout.ai, the advanced claims automation solution, harnesses the power of Contextual AI to revolutionise the insurance experience for global insurers and their consumers alike. The solution leverages proprietary Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies to deliver significantly reduced claim settlement times, increased fraud detection and industrial grade security to insurers.
The solution is already deployed across three continents focusing on the property, motor and health insurance verticals. www.sprout.ai.
About Octopus Ventures
Octopus Ventures, part of the Octopus Group, is built to specialise in the four areas we believe will change the world for the better: health, money, deep tech and consumer. We have backed the founding teams of nearly 120 companies including Zoopla, Secret Escapes, graze.com, tails.com, Swiftkey, Elvie, Depop, Sofar Sounds, Big Health, Bought By Many, ByMiles, OLIO and Cazoo. Some of our portfolio companies have gone on to join forces with the world’s largest businesses including Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Twitter. With £1.3 billion under management and investing over £100m a year, Octopus Ventures is one of the largest and most active venture investors in Europe. Our typical investment is from £1 million for Seed to £10 million for Series B and we can continue to fund the companies we back right through to IPO. We are based in London and New York with a network that spans from San Francisco to China. The companies we back become a part of this network, with access to a formidable resource of experience and expertise.
Our investment focus:
● Future of Health: Transforming the health industry, from digital therapeutics through to biotechnology.
● Future of Money: Revolutionising society’s ability to exchange and allocate financial resources and risk.
● Deep Tech: The tools and technologies that will power the next industrial revolution. These include quantum computing, robotics and drones, sensory human augmentation and 3D printing.
● Consumer: Reinventing the everyday, in how we live, work, travel, play, rest and recuperate.
About Zurich in the UK
Zurich UK provides a suite of general insurance and life insurance products to retail and corporate customers. We supply personal, commercial and local authority insurance through a number of distribution channels, and offer a range of protection, retirement and savings policies available online and through financial intermediaries for the retail market and via employee benefit consultants for the corporate market. Based in a number of locations across the UK – with large sites in Birmingham, Farnborough, Glasgow, London, Swindon and Whiteley – Zurich employs approximately 4,500 people in the UK. https://www.zurich.co.uk/
About Zurich Globally
Zurich Insurance Group (Zurich) is a leading multi-line insurer that serves its customers in global and local markets. With about 55,000 employees, it provides a wide range of property and casualty, and life insurance products and services in more than 215 countries and territories. Zurich’s customers include individuals, small businesses, and mid-sized and large companies, as well as multinational corporations. The Group is headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland, where it was founded in 1872. The holding company, Zurich Insurance Group Ltd (ZURN), is listed on the SIX Swiss Exchange and has a level I American Depositary Receipt (ZURVY) program, which is traded over-the-counter on OTCQX. Further information about Zurich is available at www.zurich.com.
