AI commercial insurance platform Planck raises $16m

The AI commercial insurance platform Planck today announced in a blog post that they have successfully raised $16m in a Series B funding round which was led by Team8 Capital and had participation from all existing investors who include Viola FinTech, Arbor Ventures, Eight Roads as well as new investors Nationwide and HDI Group. 

The company said the funding will be used to expand its customer base, support the global expansion, and enhance their innovative product roadmap. 

Elad Tsur, Planck CEO and co-founder, says: “Identifying the actual risk factors is the core of insurance. During times of rapid changes, real-time data is more crucial than ever.”

Planck uses AI on its platform to create underwriting insights which they claim has a 90% accuracy for clients to reduce risk and expenses when taking out insurance contracts. 

The commercial insurance platform uses natural language processing (NLP) machine vision, and unstructured data analysis to scan thousands of different industry-specific topics that include social networks, review sites, public records, and governmental databases to give a client millions of data points about a particular business within a selected industry. 

Planck offers four core service offerings which include submissions, underwriting, policy monitoring, and renewals. 

Across these four services, they enable customers to identify and potentially reduce risk, automate underwriting processes, increase efficiency, and increase retention rates. 

Tsur went on to say: “We are thankful for the ongoing support and trust demonstrated by our customers and new and existing investors in this round. We are grateful for the opportunity to help our customers understand the changes in their books and business that have occurred in the last couple of months, due to the COVID-19 breakout. Planck will continue its role as a catalyst for digital transformation initiatives on all fronts, so commercial insurers can reduce the time and resources invested in the submission, underwriting, audit and renewal processes; incorporate new indicative markers into their models; and above all, achieve a dramatic increase in data accuracy and completeness, all of which yields better business results.”

The New York-based commercial insurance platform was founded in 2016 by co-founders Elad Tsur, Amir Cohen, and David Schapiro with the mission to “empower insurance companies with instant and accurate data insights” and now has over 60 team members with another office in Tel-Aviv, Israel. 

Tsur and Cohen were the duo behind data mining startup BlueTail which was acquired by Salesforce in 2012 and then rebranded as Salesforce Einstein. 

The AI commercial insurance platforms client roster includes the likes of industry titans such as Chubb, Great American Insurance Group’s Republic Indemnity, and AIG’s Attune and dozens of commercial insurance companies in the USA with “more than half of the top-30 insurers” according to what Tsur told TechCrunch. 

Erik Ross, leader of Nationwide’s venture capital and mergers and acquisitions teams explained why they took part in the funding round by saying: “After assessing several companies in the marketplace, we quickly determined Planck provides faster and more consistent data for commercial insurers like Nationwide. We are impressed with this founding team’s experience building and scaling companies across both AI and InsurTech and are looking forward to supporting their growth.”

Sarit Firon, Managing Partner at Team8 Capital explained how they were impressed by Planck’s technology by saying: “We were very impressed by the depth of Planck’s technology stack and its ability to highlight all related risk factors of a business in real-time. I’m very much looking forward to working with such an experienced, proven leadership team to drive this transformational technology across the commercial insurance sector,”

This brings Planck’s total raised capital so far up to $28m following a $12m round in July 2018.