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i3 Systems, An AI-Powered Insure-tech Platform Raises USD $1 Mn in Investment from Unitus Ventures and Others

Written by Capria Admin
May 9, 2018

7 May 2018, Bengaluru. Mumbai-based i3 Systems, which is transforming India’s health insurance industry with its digital solutions and AI products for automation of medical underwriting and claims, today announced that it has raised USD $1 million in investment from Unitus Ventures, India’s leading impact venture fund investing in early-stage startups innovating for the masses. Angel investors Behram Vakil, Founding Partner of AZB Partners and Jerxis Vandrevala, Founder of Sanchez Computers Inc and Zenta also participated in this investment round.

In the next 12 months, the company aims to partner with India’s top 20 Life and Health insurance companies and process 1 million policies through its digital platform.

“Unitus’ funding will enable us to grow our medical data science team to increase the depth of our diagnostic-risk and secondary care evaluation technology. We are also setting up a dedicated customer success team to execute 10 insurance partnerships in India and abroad” said Dr. Mallesh Bommanahal, CEO of i3 Systems.

“We first met i3 Systems through our StartHealth competition. What resonated well with us was how their medical data science and natural language processing technologies’ could transform India’s microinsurance industry. This was very aligned with Mallesh and Varzavand’s vision for the business and led us to invest in them,” said Srikrishna Ramamoorthy, Partner at Unitus Ventures.

India’s health insurance reaches only 7 per cent population

In India’s health insurance industry, decisions are based purely on manual judgement by browsing nearly 50-100 page scans of medical documents for correlating more than 50 data points. This causes underwriting and claim processing to be prone to errors, inconsistent judgement, lacks audit-trails and leakage to fraud.

This results in two disadvantages. One, due to leakages in underwriting and claims processing, insurance companies typically suffer ~15 per cent underwriting losses compared to the premium collected.

Two, this further results in lack of interest in micro-insurance or low-ticket insurance products eliminating customers with lower spending potential completely. Overall health insurance penetration in India currently stands at a meagre 7 per cent of the population and is heavily concentrated around the four metros only.

i3 Systems: Eliminating ~15 per cent underwriting losses and expanding access among India’s low-income masses

i3 Systems’ is solving the above-mentioned issues through its data-centric digital solutions and AI products that enable accurate and automated health insurance underwriting and claims processing. With i3 Systems’ platform 60% of the policy underwriting can be automated and turnaround time for a claim settlement is reduced to 30 minutes from more than 10 days currently.

“Having worked in the IT sector for more than two decades, I was attracted to i3 Systems’ business model… lean on overheads and more on products that are developed around Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities. In less than a year, these products have already had a sizeable impact on the insurance industry and in the years to come they will only bring about significant changes in the way this sector is run,” said Jerxis Vandrevala, Founder of Sanchez Computers Inc and Zenta.

I3 Systems’ first product DataMD automates six steps in the medical underwriting process (medical reports check, data-digitization, medical standardization, medical rules execution, fake-data identification, and straight-through-processing for normal cases) reducing the entire process from five days to one hour.

The second product, i3Claim converts all hospitalization documents into digital data and presents it on a special interface to the claim adjudication doctor. It has multiple in-built automations such as identification of missing documents; validation of claim date; isolation of non-payable items etc. i3claim, is currently undergoing validation of its performance on mediclaims from more than 35, 000 hospitals in India.

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“I3 systems’ DataMD product helped us to adopt a data-centric and truly digital medical underwriting process. The solution has helped us in reducing our policy processing timelines as well as setting up a quality control of digitized data. The entire solution was implemented within a reasonably good time.

The strength of I3 systems lies in the completeness and comprehensiveness of their product with the ability to read and analyze medical reports,” said Ashish Sharma, Senior Vice President, Innovations and Enterprise PMO at HDFC Ergo.

i3 Systems’ technology transforms prevalent PDF-centric processes to data-centric ones, and further uses AI to accurately qualify risk and detect fraud. While some insurance companies and startups have been trying to establish hospital networks to collect digital data, their penetration has remained at a meagre 2-3% of the hospitals in India after investing few hundred million dollars in capital. On the other hand, i3 Systems’ technology works on documents from any hospital, presented using any medical nomenclature in hospital bills, pharmacy bills and diagnostic reports. This helps insurance companies implement data-centric processes on a very large scale by simply using email or an internet portal or even a mobile phone App for document aggregation.

Way forward: Partnerships with India’s top 20 life and health insurance companies

i3system’s DataMD product has brought in significant transformation in data-centric medical underwriting and corporate wellness projects at India’s top 2 insurance companies; ICICI Lombard and HDFC Ergo. It has parsed more than 2 million diagnostic reports and has predicted health risk for over 100,000 policies already.

In the next 12 months, i3 Systems is working to partner with India’s top 20 life and health insurance companies and increase the reach of its products to 1 million policies and 1 million mediclaims.


 

About i3 Systems

i3systems is an AI product company, building automation products for health and life insurance sector. Its AI systems implement data-centric processes which completely transforms the way policies are underwritten and claim are settled. I3 Systems has created a unique framework which blends cutting-edge technologies like computational linguistics, machine learning, image processing, and interactive interfaces; making its technology robust enough to work well even on poorly scanned document PDFs.

Its first product called DataMD performs underwriting process-automation, execution of medical rule engines, and ultimately fraud detection. DataMD is currently deployed with two of the three largest private sector General Insurance companies in India. More about i3 Systems >

About Unitus Ventures

Unitus Ventures is the leading impact venture fund investing in startups innovating for the masses in India, focusing on healthcareeducation and inclusive fintech. Founded in 2012, Unitus Ventures is a part of the Capria Network, the leading global network of impact fund managers, focused on addressing the “missing middle” finance opportunity by investing in high-growth businesses in emerging markets of Africa, Asia and Latin America. Capria Network is managed by Capria Ventures, a leading global investment firm, and is part of Unitus Group, a premier financial services group operating in India and other emerging markets since 2000. Unitus Ventures is based in Bangalore and Seattle and is a member of the India Impact Investors Council.

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