Applied AI startup Knowtions secures $5 million Series A funding to help health Insurers adopt artificial intelligence

There is a growing market to help property and casualty insurance businesses adopt AI, but health insurance is being left behind. Health insurance is at the intersection of two complicated fields, facing both difficulties in working with health data and the complexity of insurance operations. The Toronto, Canada-based Knowtions Research is an applied artificial intelligence company with a mission to make the world’s health data useful. Knowtions combines machine learning and expert communities to solve multilingual data challenges in social listening, patient experience. Knowtions helps health insurers be more effective, reliable and affordable for everyone by transforming data into predictive insights in our enterprise AI platform. Its Lydia AI platform helps insurers unlock and use predictive insights in messy health data to automate claims processing and personalize customer experience.

Today, Knowtions announced it has raised $5 million in Series A funding to scale the deployment of Lydia and grow the Knowtions team of machine learning scientists and platform engineers over the next 12 months. The latest round is led by Information Venture Partners with participation from Alibaba Entrepreneurs Fund. People buy health insurance to make sure they can afford the care they need when they get sick. However, skyrocketing healthcare costs threaten to make insurance policies less affordable for individuals. Knowtions believes AI could be the answer to reversing this trend and is working towards helping health insurers transform with the power of AI. The company has doubled in headcount since last year and plans to double again by the beginning of 2019.

Founded in 2013 by Anthony Lee, Christina Cai, Fedor Suprychev, and Kresimir Bojcic, Knowtions developed Lydia, an AI platform that helps health insurers unlock and use predictive insights in messy (unusable) health data. Lydia learns how people seek medical care globally to make predictions on fraudulent behavior and health risks. Insurers use these predictions to create AI-assisted workflows that automate claims processing and personalize customer experience. Knowtions provides predictive capabilities for insurers to automate claim management and enhance the patient experience.

Anthony Lee, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer at Knowtions, believes this is the opportunity Knowtions captures and comments, “We founded Knowtions to make the world’s health data useful. In order to do that, we built our foundations in advancing Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology because much of global health data is unstructured and messy. Unlocking these data points enables better predictions on human health and behavior than ever before.”

The Lydia AI platform works by building people profiles and learning healthcare behaviors that are specific to each insurer’s region, doctors and members. The platform then uses these learnings to make predictions about people’s behaviors, health risks and best care options. Insurers inject these predictions into different workflows to improve efficiency and ultimately reinvent the customer experience. By providing industry-specific solutions to transform health insurance, Knowtions is a vertical AI company in the InsurTech market.

David Unsworth, the lead investor of the round and General Partner at Information Venture Partners, states “As a fund, we invest in vertical applied AI companies, particularly in the financial services, in order to solve core operational pain points. We believe Knowtions has a unique approach to applying AI to solving the most pressing issues in the insurance industry including fraud waste and abuse.”