The start-up said the raise was led by Luxembourg-based private investment fund Blamar, with help from existing investors such as the InsurTech incubator Plug and Play Ventures
Dec 7, 2018 | 1 min Read
Originally Published December 7, 2018 at The Insurance Insider.
The start-up said the raise was led by Luxembourg-based private investment fund Blamar, with help from existing investors such as the InsurTech incubator Plug and Play Ventures.
ZestyAI CEO and co-founder Attila Toth told this publication that the start-up spoke with multiple investors before settling on a partnership with Blamar.
“What we realised is that we needed a partner who sees the market the same way that we see the market,” Toth said in an interview with The Insurance Insider.
Toth said his vision of the market is that it is full of “tremendous opportunity” for AI, but also requires patience on the part of an investor for that opportunity to come to fruition.
“The insurance industry historically has not been at the forefront of AI, so we were looking for investors who not only understand the opportunity but have the patience to see it through,” he said.
Plug and Play added ZestyAI to its incubator in April. The company was selected by its cohort as the “most innovative start-up” of its class in August 2018.
The start-up uses artificial intelligence (AI) to help property & casualty (re)insurers, MGAs and InsurTechs assess risk by using sophisticated data to model multi-peril catastrophic loss events.
Toth said the funding will go toward cultivating and attracting new talent to ZestyAI, fostering new partnerships across the industry and increasing the InsurTech’s access to what he described as “proprietary data”.
That specialised data includes information collected by Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) low-flying aircrafts that can provide precise measurements of the earth’s surface, as well as property information.
“That type of data is not very easy to come by, and we have access to that data but it is not very easy to compute,” Toth said. “With this funding, we are going to double down on using this unique data source.”
About ZestyAI
ZestyAI is the leading partner for property & casualty insurance companies embarking on digital transformation. The company harnesses the power of artificial intelligence on cutting-edge data sources including aerial imagery to model risk to real property. ZestyAI leverages predictive algorithms on 130+Bn data points to understand the potential impact of natural catastrophes on individual properties with unprecedented accuracy. Insurance companies rely on these property risk insights to make smart marketing, underwriting and rating decisions. For more information, visit https://zesty.ai.