SUMMARY
The Startup Aims To Process Underwriting Of 1 Mn Insurance Policies By March 2019
Mumbai-based i3 Systems, an AI-Powered Insure-tech Platform has raised $1 Mn funding from Unitus Ventures. 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.
The announcement came in just a few days after Unitus Ventures (formerly known as Unitus Seed Fund) raised $15 Mn (INR 100 Cr) towards the first close of its $45.2 Mn (INR 300 Cr) Unitus Ventures Fund II.
With the raised funding, i3 Systems is planning to partner with India’s top 20 Life and Health insurance companies and process one million policies through its digital platform, in the next 12 months.
“We first met i3 Systems 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,” said Srikrishna Ramamoorthy, Partner at Unitus Ventures.
Going by the facts, in India’s health insurance industry, decisions are based purely on the manual judgment by browsing nearly 50-100 page scans of medical documents for correlating more than 50 data points.
This results in two disadvantages. One, due to leakages in underwriting and claims processing, insurance companies typically suffer ~15 per cent 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.
“Overall health insurance penetration in India currently stands at a meager 7% of the population and is heavily concentrated around the four metros only,” as shared by i3 Systems in a media statement.
i3 Systems claims to eliminate 15% of the underwriting losses and expanding access among India’s low-income masses. It further claims to has parsed more than 2 Mn diagnostic reports and has predicted health risk for over 100,000 policies already.
“With i3 Systems’ platform 60% of the policy underwriting can be automated and turnaround time for a claim settlement is reduced to 30 minutes from more than 10 days currently.
I3 Systems’ first product DataMD automates six steps in the medical underwriting process (medical reports check, data-digitization, medical standardization, medical rules execution, fake-data identification, and straight-through-processing for normal cases) reducing the entire process from five days to one hour.
Also, the second product, i3Claim converts all hospitalization documents into digital data and presents it on a special interface to the claim adjudication doctor. It has multiple in-built automations such as identification of missing documents; validation of claim date; isolation of non-payable items etc. i3claim, is currently undergoing validation of its performance on mediclaims from more than 35, 000 hospitals in India, as claimed by the i3Systems team.
With the recent funding, how well i3Systems will be able to fulfill its ambitions will be interesting to watch.
