Planck Re lands $12 million to bring AI to the commercial insurance market

There’s a lot of money to be made in safeguarding the future. To do so effectively, the insurance industry is turning to artificial intelligence (AI) to nail down premiums and provide you and your businesses with the correct level of coverage.

Commercial insurance data company, Planck Re, announced today that it has raised $12 million to generate insights that streamline the commercial underwriting process. This means insurers will be able to instantly and accurately underwrite any policy.

The funding round, Planck Re’s first, was led by Arbor Ventures and includes involvement from Viola Fintech and Eight Roads.

“The funds will be used to expand our product line to more SME segments, such as retail, services, contractors, IT, and manufacturers,” Planck Re CEO Elad Tsur told me. “We plan to expand our research and development team in Israel and sales team in North America.”

Founded in 2016, Planck Re uses an AI-powered data platform that combines data sources with data science. By aggregating the digital footprint of small and mid-sized businesses, the company aims to help insurers acquire a comprehensive understanding of customer risk.

The platform works by automatically creating a detailed customer profile, through mining publicly available data on the internet. It gathers relevant information from any resource, including images, text, videos, social media, and public records, to create an accurate view of the parameters that could affect insurance.

“In a digitalized society, where public data is accessible, expanding the data points’ coverage and accuracy automatically is imperative for the insurance industry,” said Lior Simon, VP of Israel Arbor Ventures.

Planck Re then keeps tabs on the insured through continuous monitoring, which helps keep the portfolio up-to-date and facilitates automated renewals.

The platform’s algorithms crunch historical client data to fine-tune existing models and introduce new criteria, and the company claims it has a more than 90 percent accuracy rate.

Planck Re will initially focus on the U.S. commercial insurance market. Based on pilot schemes conducted with several top-tier insurance carriers in the U.S., Planck Re’s platform has automatically and accurately completed over 90 percent of the information needed in insurance onboarding questionnaires.

“I grew up in an insurance family,” Tsur said. “My father was the head of the life and annuity business for the largest insurance broker in Israel. I remember sitting in the car with my father as he took me to school and listening to his conversations. After I sold my previous startup to Salesforce, I started to think about insurance and began to see areas within the industry that could be improved using the same analytic rigor. I joined forces with other cofounders who brought deep AI, technology, and insurance background to Planck Re.”