GetmeIns and Seegnature are two Israeli startups who participated and won the first startup competition for insurtech launched in Israel last November by Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP – the largest venture capital fund in Israel, nearly one billion dollars available).
The competition raffled a million bucks for the placed first, but the quality of the projects presented, according to authoritative sources, was so high that no shilly-shally and the prize money was doubled to allow the investment in two “grand prizes” namely GetmeIns and Seegnature.
What do these companies do?
GetmeIns works in the field of fraud prevention and has developed a single platform to reduce the number of claims reported to insurance carriers. GetmeIns works with data analysis, applying the concept of “military-grade intelligence”, as stated in the website, to the insurance industry to prevent fraud, making it possible for companies to save time and money to investigate claims. Technology prevents fraud from the moment of purchase, thanks to the combination of several frameworks, including: Link Analysis, Open Source Intelligence, Visual Intelligence, Signal and Image Processing, Photogrammetry, Text Analytics ecc.
In this technology the actual user profiling is crucial: The platform (mobile first) drives the user towards the self-profiling through the “Pay as you live” philosophy that allows users to customize their insurance policy based on daily needs and changing lifestyles.
Seegnature has developed a technology that allows consumer businesses (such as insurance companies) to close contracts remotely, by verifying customer identity and even signing them on real-time documents. The benefits that Seegnature offers are an increase in contracts entered into,(revenues improvement), reduced processing time (productivity), greater customer satisfaction (customer experience). In addition, using its own machine learning systems, Seegnature analyzes in real time the big data generated by contract signing to provide valuable real-time tips to the company to close the contract faster.
Both companies raise funds at home, but their reference market is overseas, as they said in the aftermath of the award received by JVP.
Seegnature’s founder and CEO Yair Ravid said: “The platform we have created allows companies to eliminate barriers preventing to enter into complex bids. The resources brought by this award will help us to launch our platform on US financial markets, particularly towards insurance carriers and banks. We’re gonna start sales activities with a team in the US, leaving our R&D in Israel”.
“We have won twice – emphasized GetMeIns founder and CEO Eugene Greenberg – we want to make artificial intelligence capabilities our core business, to raise more funds in Israel, and then by the end of the year, open an office for business development in the United States.”
The quality of these two startups and the very “birth” of the competition, show how the Silicon Wadi (the name given to the Israeli tech valley, thanks to the similarity with Silicon Valley) has targeted the rising sector of the insurtech, where the very sophisticated technological level that Israeli research centers can reach, can make a difference. Silicon Wadi is a structured ecosystem to create excellence technology, fund it properly with startup investments that are then launched on global markets: although Israel is very small, it has the highest per capita venture capital investment in the world; it has the highest number of listed companies at Nasdaq; At least 50% of the world’s leading tech companies have research centers in the country; Is the second country in the world for engineers, computer scientists and qualified scientists; Is a wealthy country whose government supports an impressive defense industry that is heavily investing in R&D and whose solutions are often shifted to the civil sector. (For more details, read this article on Israel’s ecosystem).
In short, the entrance into the insurtech scenery of Silicon Wadi will further light up the competition between startups and companies. Another example of Israeli startup (although formally US) is Next Insurance, which has reached a $ 13 million seed investment, thanks to a platform that revolutionizes the purchasing experience of Insurance products by SMEs.
Another example is Cybewrite, a very young startup that started to get attention, thanks to its machine learning technology designed to help insurance carriers define and manage risk in cyber-crime policies.
