Health insurance and AI startup Qantev has raised €30 million

Health insurance and AI startup Qantev has raised €30 million

Health insurance companies are faced with an increasing number of claims for insurance benefits due to the increase in chronic diseases and an aging population. However, their current application processes do not scale properly. While automation with artificial intelligence (AI) can be a solution, it requires much more fine-tuning in health insurance than in other industries.

Automation in Insurance: Why It’s Complicated

In sectors such as property and casualty insurance, automation was introduced decades ago, leading to the emergence of major players such as Guidewire. However, health insurance is much more difficult to automate.

Health insurance involves many factors, from evaluating the need for treatment to verifying the accuracy of billing. To simplify these processes, a startup Qantev develops AI-based software for major insurance companies such as AXA and Generali. II-models check insurance applications for compliance with the standards by which specialists work. “Is the treatment necessary? Is the price correct? Are there signs of fraud?” — the system solves these issues much faster than a person, which helps to reduce costs and reduce customer churn.

The story of Qantev: how an idea became a startup

Tariq Dadi saw the need to automate insurance processes while working as a senior data scientist at AXA. At this time he was joined by Hadrien de Marche, a PhD and former quantitative analyst with a deep mathematical background. Together, they founded Qantev in late 2018 on the platform. Entrepreneur First. As Dadi himself admits, he came to EF with a ready-made idea, although usually participants come there to find an idea and a team.

Qantev has attracted investment quickly: in 2020 the startup received €1.7 million in a seed round from venture capital firm Elaia, and in 2022 a €10 million Series A round from Omnes and Raise Ventures. The startup recently raised €30 million in Series B from Blossom Capital. This round, according to Dadi, took place earlier than expected due to the high relevance of the topic, in particular the use of AI to automate complex processes.

AI in health insurance: challenges and the Qantev approach

One of the key ideas of Qantev was the understanding that one large AI model is not enough to solve complex problems in health insurance. Their software uses a set of highly specialized AI models that are trained on customer data and tuned for high accuracy.

“You can’t make mistakes or hallucinate here, like in other areas, because it concerns people’s health. You can’t refuse cancer treatment because of an AI error,” Dadi says.

Therefore, Qantev continues to be a large AI company with many machine learning experts working to build highly specialized models for specific tasks.

Growth plans and international expansion

Despite its rapid growth, Qantev is aware that it may face competition from new startups, especially those that use large-scale language models (LLM) to solve similar problems. However, Qantev is betting on its experience and availability of unique data. The company plans to use the funds from the latest round to hire specialists in AI and engineering to strengthen its technology leadership. The goal of the startup is to double the number of employees by the end of the year.

In addition, Qantev is actively expanding internationally. The company has already opened an office in Hong Kong to work in Asian markets and plans to strengthen its presence in North America. Despite the presence of competitors such as Alaffia Health and Anomaly, Qantev has a competitive advantage of working with large international customers, which facilitates organic growth through the implementation of solutions at the level of global branches.

Working with large insurance companies has its own peculiarities. On the one hand, these are long and complex sales cycles. On the other hand, large deals, which makes cooperation with such clients very profitable. Blossom Capital, the lead investor in the Series B round, understands the specifics of enterprise software and Qantev’s ambitions well, Dadi said. The startup aims to become more than just an automation tool, but a full-fledged health insurance platform that can span multiple products.

The Future of Qantev: What’s Next?

While Qantev is currently focused on claims management and fraud detection, in the future the company may focus on automating other processes such as underwriting (assessment of insurance risks). Access to data and cooperation with leading industry players give Qantev the opportunity to expand the functionality of the platform and help customers optimize even more processes.

Overall, this reflects the global trend of using AI to combat rising healthcare costs and improve the efficiency of insurance companies.

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