Planck Re Announces $12M Series A to Empower Commercial Insurers With AI Driven Insights

NEW YORK and TEL AVIV, Israel, July 3, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Planck Re announces their first funding round of $12M to empower commercial insurers by generating insights that streamline the commercial underwriting process – enabling insurers to instantly and accurately underwrite any policy. The round was led by Arbor Ventures and includes Viola FinTech and Eight Roads.

Founded in 2016, Planck Re is pioneering the commercial insurance data industry, providing an Artificial Intelligence (AI) driven data platform. Leveraging deep industry expertise and breakthrough data science, Planck Re streamlines the commercial underwriting process by aggregating small and medium businesses' digital footprint to help insurers acquire a comprehensive understanding of customer risk.

Planck Re achieves this through:

• Providing significant data quickly: Planck Re automatically creates a detailed customer profile, through open-web data-mining and AI, gathering relevant information from any type of resource including images, text, videos, social media and public records; creating an accurate view of key influencing insurance parameters.
• Delivering key insights: Using the latest advances in AI and machine learning (ML) - including image processing capabilities & semantic analysis of unstructured data - Planck Re is able to gain detailed and accurate insights about any commercial business.
  Highlighting any changes through continuous monitoring, Planck Re ensures the provision of an up-to-date, intelligent business profile making renewals easy and automated.
• Increasing Accuracy: Planck Re's data platform provides over 90% accuracy rate, leading to improved loss ratios. The company's algorithms are additionally able to crunch historical client data to fine tune existing models and introduce new criteria.

The end result is a frictionless underwriting process with greater insurance carrier visibility into risk factors, leading to improved conversion, retention and reduced loss ratios.

Elad Tsur, Planck Re CEO, says: "Buying insurance in 2018 still involves endless questions filled by humans. In addition to it being a time-consuming and labor-intensive process, it's also prone to errors. Emerging from two years of research and development, we resolved this by leveraging AI and Big Data technologies to provide answers to all required underwriting questions, with name and address being the only manual inputs."

Planck Re will initially focus on the U.S. commercial insurance market. Based on pilots conducted with several top-tier insurance carriers in the U.S., Planck Re's platform manages to automatically and accurately complete over 90% of the fields in the onboarding questionnaires.

Planck Re's founding team - comprised of Elad Tsur, Amir Cohen and David Schapiro - has an extensive background in insurance and technology. Prior to founding Planck Re, Elad and Amir founded Bluetail, which was acquired by Salesforce, where they continued to lead the architecture of the AI platform, rebranded as Salesforce Einstein. David is also a familiar face in the insurance industry, having led analytical insurtech player Earnix for a decade and turning it into one of the leading analytical insurtech players. He is also a Non-Executive Director at Bought By Many.

The investment round was led by Arbor Ventures. Lior Simon VP and Head of Israel at Arbor Ventures said, "We are excited to partner with Planck Re and the driven, entrepreneurial team. Insurance companies are thirsty for actionable data, to assess risk, gain real time insights and enhance customer understanding. Planck Re aims to empower them through a streamlined digital approach, which we believe will truly alter the insurance industry."

Viola Fintech also participated in the funding. "We're proud to have Planck Re as our first investment in the fund and to be a partner in their journey as they navigate in the complex task of cooperation with large financial institutions. We both share the vision of bridging the gap between insurance world and the start-up ecosystem and believe their solution would be transformational for the insurance industry," says Tomer Michaeli, GP at Viola FinTech.

About the Company

Planck Re empowers insurance companies with a commercial insurance data platform. Leveraging deep industry expertise and breakthrough data science, it generates insights that streamline the commercial underwriting process – enabling insurance carriers to instantly and accurately underwrite any policy. Planck Re was founded by a team of serial entrepreneurs with an extensive background in insurance and technology. For more information, visit https://www.planckre.com

About Arbor Ventures

Arbor Ventures is a global early-stage venture capital firm focused on shaping the way the world transacts by investing in companies at the intersection of financial services, AI and digital commerce. We partner with extraordinary founders and help accelerate their growth with Arbor's global strategic network

About Viola Fintech

Viola FinTech is a cross-stage venture fund that invests in global FinTech companies alongside leading venture investors. We bridge the gap between the worlds of financial institutions and innovative startups.The fund brings together financial institutions and innovative startups to accelerate the modernization and digitization of financial institutions and support the growth of FinTech companies.

About Eight Roads

Eight Roads Ventures is the proprietary investment arm of Fidelity International Limited (FIL) and partners with high-quality, high-growth companies across a broad range of sectors. Eight Roads provides a long-term investment mindset, a powerful network of resources and a team of investment professionals with a proven track record of success. Investments include Alibaba, Akulaku, BankBazaar, Chai Point, Cipla Health, Innovent, Laurus Labs, Manthan Systems and Unbxd.

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SOURCE Planck Re