Oscar bulks up as Google exits

The dollars grow

Hi there,

In March 2015, Google officially entered the US insurance market to much fanfare with launch of its auto insurance comparison engine, Google Compare. Less than a year later, Google has announced that it is pulling the plug.

Despite the challenges Google faced, a number of venture investors have bet on startups operating in the US auto insurance comparison market. We take a look at the current crop of US startups.

Machine intelligence for insurance

Late last year, Shivon Zilis of Bloomberg Beta (@shivon) penned a great post breaking down how companies specializing across various problem types in machine learning/AI work in the real world. 

What’s interesting is that a number of so-called machine intelligence startups have found their way into insurance-specific applications. Most of these startups aren’t fundamentally re-imagining insurance, but rather aiming to maximize profits and efficiency of existing insurance companies.

I’ve compiled a few examples from the CB Insights database below.

DataRobot – Founded by Travelers Insurance alums, DataRobot takes existing data and builds deployable predictive models using machine learning automation software. New York Life is a strategic investor.

Captricity – Originating out of PhD research in Tanzania and Uganda, Captricity claims to have eight out of the 10 largest insurance carriers as customers of its software that takes information from handwritten forms and turns it into digital data.

Understory – Understory uses sensors in cities like Kansas City and Dallas to gather weather data. American Family Insurance was an early customer of Understory’s data.

Kaggle – The startup provides a platform that harnesses data science competitions to improve predictive models. Kaggle recently hosted Prudential’s Life Insurance modeling challenge, which had the third-most team entrants ever for a prize-based Kaggle competition.

Insurify – Insurify is aiming to create a service allowing users to take a photo of their driver’s license and receive policy recommendations via text message.

Health insurance funding keeps growing

Oscar’s new $400M funding round now makes it the second most well-capitalized insurance tech startup. Four of the top five are in the health insurance space. See who else has raked in the dollars.

Have a great rest of the week.

Matt
@mlcwong