InsurTech startup owl.co Labs, Inc. raised $30 million in new venture capital. Many plans are in play to spend the cash infusion, including hiring, and accelerated growth plans for the company’s machine learning-focused insurance claims monitoring platform.
“By leveraging machine learning to automate and remove bias from the process, we are blazing the trail to a future where nobody pays for fraud,” Sean Merat, co-founder and CEO of owl.co, said in prepared remarks.
The technology involves a secure, evidence-based insurance claims monitoring platform that owl.co claims has greater due diligence at scale, while removing human bias from the detection process. With machine learning, owl.co automates the claims monitoring process. The company asserts that its “sophisticated insurance fraud methodology” finds five times more fraudulent cases than other options, helping clients and claimants to save money.
owl.co’s founders said the platform can help insurance providers stop unwarranted claim payments, release reserves, and adjust expenses, helping keep premiums down and save consumers money. It’s designed to automatically detect significant losses from malingering, exaggerated, or non-eligible claims.
owl.co does not use claimant data such as age, gender, neighborhood stats, or race in its models to determine eligibility in order to eliminate biases. With machine learning, owl.co’s platform flags potential fraud intuitively, so organizations can prioritize and deprioritize claims. The platform also addresses ineligible disability and workers compensation insurance claims, the company said.
The InsurTech asserts that 6 of the 10 largest U.S. insurers use its platform to automate their fraud detection and claims monitoring processes, though it did not name those specific customers in its release.
Cota Capital led the Series B financing round, joined by Sorenson Ventures, FUSE, Impression Ventures, Luge Capital, and Plug and Play Ventures. The company said it will use the funding to scale its insurance claims monitoring platform and expand its team. Hiring of full-time staff will take place in the U.S. and Canada, through the end of this year and into 2022. To date, owl.co has raised $40 million overall.
In 2020, owl.co was awarded a co-investment of CAD$4.5 million from the Canadian government as part of the country’s Innovation Superclusters Initiative. The program encourages industry leaders to collaborate on large-scale projects to speed up growth in some of Canada’s most promising industries.
owl.co was founded in 2018 and has offices in Vancouver, B.C., Toronto, New York and Seattle.
Source: owl.co