Sprout.ai raises $11M Series A led by Octopus Ventures to apply AI to insurance claims – TechCrunch

It was way back in 2018 that Omni:us appeared to disrupt the insurance market by applying AI to this most legacy of all industries. It has now gone on to raise $44.1 million. In a similar vein, Shift Technology in France has raised $100 million.

Now a U.K. startup aims to do something similar, but this time it will be coming out of the key market of the U.K., where the insurance industry is enormous.

Sprout.ai is an insurtech startup that uses AI to help insurance companies settle claims within 24 hours. It has now raised an £8 million/$11 million Series A round led by Octopus Ventures. The round was joined by existing investors Amadeus Capital Partners, Playfair Capital and Techstars. It was seed funded buy Amadeus in 2020.

Sprout.ai supplies global insurers, such as Zurich, with a product that applies NLP and OCR to insurance claims (which might involve such things as handwritten doctors’ notes, for instance) to enable them to be resolved faster, in not a dissimilar fashion to Omni:us and Shift. Sprout.ai says it now has deployments in Europe, South America and APAC.

Niels Thoné, CEO of Sprout.ai, said in a statement: “Sprout.ai’s mission is to revolutionize 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.”

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.”

As we can see, the market is heating up for this kind of service, so it will be interesting to see if these startups end up “land-locked” to their language markets or not. Certainly, I can see M&A opportunities for whoever starts to lead the pack.