Health and life insurance providers face rising claims due to chronic disease and aging, but their processes lack scalability. AI automation can help, but it requires more coordination than other types of insurance.
For example, automation in property and casualty insurance led to the creation of the publicly traded company Guidewire decades ago, but health insurance is a tougher field. “You can't automate it in a simple way like if your car's windshield breaks,” Paris-based entrepreneur Tariq Dadi told TechCrunch.
His startup, Qantev, wants to solve this problem. The company provides software that helps clients such as AXA and Generali manage claims through an AI model that performs the same checks that in-house medical staff currently perform. Is the price reasonable? Is the invoice fraudulent? ” But it's done much faster, which helps reduce costs and customer churn.
Dadi recognized this need while working as a senior data scientist at AXA. And Hadrien de March, a Ph.D., former quant and current CTO, had the math talent to deal with it. The two joined forces at the end of 2018 to form Entrepreneur First. “EF's concept is 'pre-idea, pre-team,' but I tricked them into bringing in the idea,” Duddy said.
Armed with an idea and a small team, Qantev raised a €1.7 million seed round led by Elaia in 2020, followed by a €10 million Series A round led by Omnes and Raise Ventures in 2022 I did. These three VC firms have now participated in Cantef's €30 million Series B round, which Dadi said was held ahead of schedule.
“Our topic is very hot right now, and YC found out earlier this year that we had at least three topics on our wishlist,” he said of Y Combinator startup requests. he said, referring to what he called. “LLM boom”. “We started to see a lot of small startups popping up in the US and throwing LLMs at the problem. […] We know it's a difficult problem and we have assets. ”
One of the beliefs that Qantev has developed over the past five years is that one large model is not enough. The company's software relies on a collection of AI models trained on historical data from clients and driven for accuracy. “There's no such thing as hallucinations or anything like that. It's human health. You can't refuse treatment for someone's cancer. That's why we're still a big AI shop. Our team has a lot of We have PhDs and machine learning experts, because we need to create small AI models that are highly specific to our subject,” Duddy said.
Qantev recognizes it can still be leapfrogged by new entrants, and the company will use the new funding to hire the AI and engineering talent it needs to maintain its technological edge. It's planned. The company's goal is to double the number of employees by the end of the year.
The Series B round, led by Blossom Capital, will also support Kantef's international expansion. The company plans to expand its Hong Kong office, which specializes in Asia, and make a strong push in North America.
While there are competitors in the country such as Alaffia Health and Anomaly, other Blossom portfolio companies have made strides in the US in recent years, and Qantev has unique advantages. The company's customers are large and global, and new entry creates organic expansion. A subsidiary adopts the company's software.
The downside to targeting such large customers is that the sales cycle is long and complex. “But the good thing is they are big-ticket items,” Duddy said. He liked Blossom's understanding of the enterprise software category and Qantev's ambition to become an operating system for health insurance. “We like to call this a platform because this will be multiple products.”
It has not yet been confirmed what these products will be, but underwriting appears to be a strong candidate. For now, Qantev is prioritizing claims management, but it is also looking at how it can leverage the legitimacy and data access it is gaining from early customers to develop other businesses, as it already does with fraud detection. It's easy to see how it can help you streamline your operations. In the big picture, this will tie into the trend of AI as a means to combat rising healthcare costs.