Knowtions Research, the maker of an artificial intelligence insights platform for heath insurers, has raised $5 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Information Venture Partners, with additional support from Alibaba Entrepreneurs Fund.
The company said in its announcement that the new financing will be put toward scaling the deployment of its Lydia AI platform and doubling its team within the next few months.
The Lydia platform looks to help insurers make decisions about their claims and customers from a pool of disparate health data. According to the company, it does so by leveraging natural language processing (NLP) to build unique profiles specific to region, doctor and member. These are then se loose into various insurer workflows, where they make informed predictions of individuals’ behaviors, risks and care options.
What’s the impact
Healthcare record data is notoriously unkempt, and many have pointed to NLP and AI as a potential solution for organizations looking to get their ducks in a row. For insurers specifically, the platform could be an opportunity to better automate claims, limit fraud, improve customer experiences and, ultimately, reduce costs.
“As a fund, we invest in vertical applied AI companies, particularly in the financial services, in order to solve core operational pain points,” David Unsworth, a general partner at Information Venture Partners, said in a statement. “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.”
What’s the trend
A number of payers are beginning to integrate AI and NLP into their workflows, including Optum, Prognos and Wellframe. These payers are also looking to startups like Knowtions that specialize in AI implementations — Prognos, an AI company that offers “advanced analytics” to track and predict early disease for payers, represents another such approach.
On the record
“We founded Knowtions to make the world's health data useful. In order to do that, we built our foundations in advancing [NLP] technology because much of global health data is unstructured and messy,” Anthony Lee, CEO and cofounder of Knowtions, said in a statement. “Unlocking these data points enables better predictions on human health and behavior than ever before.”
