Intelligent AI aims to reduce claims for commercial properties following £2m fundraise

Insurtech Intelligent AI (artificial intelligence) told Insurance Times it is on a mission to reduce commercial property losses for insurers after raising £2m in seed funding today (2 December 2022).

The fundraise, which was led by venture capital company SuperSeed, will be used to develop the insurtech’s intelligent underwriting platform - this aims to save £500m per year in avoidable insurance claims for the UK property sector.

The seed funding round also received participation from the Cornwall and Isles of Scilly Investment Fund, as well as several UK-based angel investors.

Intelligent AI provides global location intelligence to help insurers identify, measure, predict and mitigate property risks in real-time.

Speaking exclusively to Insurance Times, Anthony Peake, chief executive of Intelligent AI, said: “We have been working in the UK and US – we are now at a stage where we are ready to expand globally and expand our platform.

“Lloyd’s property underwriters alone lost on average £800m a year [in property claims] between 2017 and 2021.

”It’s therefore imperative [that] the industry moves away from a system based on incomplete, historical data, exacerbated by the fact that due to high costs, only 10% of properties are assessed by risk engineers.”

The £2m funding will help Intelligent AI to grow its team of specialists, drive global partnerships and further develop its platform.

This includes an AI Risk Report Analyser – this tool converts lengthy, unstructured risk reports into real-time dashboards to speed up risk mitigation programmes for corporate clients and reduce claims for brokers and insurers.

Intelligent AI also continues to run large scale, global pilots of its intelligent risk underwriting platform with insurers - this platform uses AI to extract infomation from documents, such as open data sources and satellites.

The platform brings together more than 300 data points, including real-time weather, crime rates and fire service responses. These data points help to compensate for incomplete or inaccurate datasets.

’Enormous global potential’

The insurtech formed in April 2020 – its creation catalyst was the Grenfell Tower fire in June 2017.

Since then, Intelligent AI has successfully graduated from the Lloyd’s Lab scheme in 2021 and won the Zurich Insurance UK Innovation Championship against 400 other insurtech startups in March 2022.

Prior to the business being founded, Peake had been involved in projects with insurers that looked at the use of open data, such as fire service calls.

Peake continued: “For Grenfell Tower, there were 11 fire service call outs in the year leading up to it.”

He explained that had this pattern of call outs been looked at, the tragedy may have been prevented.

Peake added: “The other main thing for me is I see underwriters and risk engineers spending 80% of [their] time doing admin - moving data from one spreadsheet to another system, to another system, etc - and spending less than 20% of [their] time actually working with clients to mitigate risk. There is no value in just doing admin. 

”We provide the market with accurate property risk data with digital twins of risk to enhance understanding [and negate] the need for costly on-site surveys.

“The funding will drive the development of our intelligent risk underwriting platform, so insurers can spend more time on risk assessment and underwriting and less time on admin, whilst delivering significantly more accurate premiums and supporting clients with risk mitigation programmes across their entire property portfolios.”

Peake noted that by getting systems to automate the collection of datasets for risk profiles, this can reduce business interruption and claims frequency for clients.

Dan Bowyer, partner at SuperSeed, added: “The next stage of development will be transformational for the business, their customers and the wider industry – there is enormous global potential here.”