Technology

Planck Re, a startup that wants to simplify insurance underwriting with artificial intelligence, announced today that it has raised a $12 million Series A. The funding was led by Arbor Ventures, with participation from Viola FinTech and Eight Roads. Co-founder and CEO Elad Tsur tells TechCrunch that the capital will be used to expand Planck Reproduct line into more segments, including retail, contractors, IT and manufacturing, and grow its research and development team in Israel and North American sales team.

The Tel Aviv and New York-based startup plans to focus first on its business in the United States, where it has already launched pilot programs with several insurance carriers. Tsur says that Planck Reclients generall use it to help underwrite insurance for small to medium-sized businesses, including business owner policies, which cover property and liability risks, and workers& compensation.

Founded in 2016 by Tsur, Amir Cohen and David Schapiro, Planck Re poses its technology as a more efficient and accurate alternative to the lengthy risk assessment questionnaire insurers ask clients to fill out. Its platform crawls the Internet for publicly available data, including images, text, videos, social media profiles and public records, to build profiles of SMBs seeking insurance coverage. Then it analyzes that data to help carriers figure out their potential risk.

Before launching Planck Re, Tsur and Cohen founded Bluetail, a data mining startup that was acquired by Salesforce in 2012, where it served as the base technology for Salesforce Einstein. Schapiro was previously CEO of financial analytics company Earnix.

There are already a handful of startups, including SoftBank-backed Lemonade, Trōv, Cover, Hippo and Swyfft, that use algorithms to make picking and buying insurance policies easier for consumers, but AI-based underwriting is still a nascent category. One example is Flyreel, which focuses on underwriting property insurance and recently signed a deal with Microsoft to accelerate its go-to-market strategy.

Tsur says Planck Re is developing more dedicated algorithms to meet the evolving needs of insurance providers. For example, many underwriters now want to know if clients in photography use aerial imaging equipment, so Planck Reimaging process capabilities automatically check images for that information.

He adds that being able to automate underwriting enables carriers to find new distribution channels, including allowing customers to apply for insurance online without needing to fill out any forms. Planck Re also continues to monitor and underwrite policies, which means if a customerrisk profile changes, insurers can react quickly.

In a statement, Arbor Ventures vice president and head of Israel Lior Simon said &We are excited to partner with Planck Re and the driven, entrepreneurial team. Insurance companies are thirsty for actionable data, to assess risk, gain real time insights and enhance customer understanding. Planck Re aims to empower them through a streamlined digital approach, which we believe will truly alter the insurance industry.&

Health insurance startup Alan has launched a new product called Alan Map in France. Ita dead simple way to find GPs, dentists, ophthalmologists and more around you.

You first type your address and the name of a doctor or the type of doctors you&re looking for. Therea big map front and center with dots representing doctors around you.

If you click on a dot or a name in the right column, you can learn more about this doctor. Alan Map currently lists the name, address, phone number, opening hours and average price. You can also find out if you can see this doctor without booking an appointment, and if they accept national healthcare cards.

This is already so much better than searching through a directory. But Alan doesn&t plan to stop there. The company will soon launch an integration with MonDocteur so that you can book an appointment from Alan Map directly. MonDocteur is one of the leading healthcare scheduling services in France with Doctolib.

But compared to Doctolib and MonDocteur, Alan Map doesn&t stop at doctors that use their own scheduling systems. Alan has partnered with the official health directory from Francenational healthcare system. You&ll find over 245,000 health professionals on Alan Map, with pricing information for nearly half of them.

The main advantage compared to Ameli.fr is that it looks much better and itmuch easier to find what you&re looking for. Design can be important, even for health products. It can be the main difference between an obscure directory on an official website and a useful map.

Eventually, Alan plans to add more data to its mapping product. For instance, as Alan is a health insurance startup, the company knows how much users are paying when they visit a specific doctor. You could anonymize and leverage this data to get exact pricing information.

Alan Map is a free product. Ita good way to promote the companyhealth insurance product and get inbound traffic. For instance, it should give an SEO boost and you might see Alan in your Google search results.

As for Alan users, they can find a doctor and know how much they&ll get back from the national healthcare system and from Alan. This way, thereno surprise when you get reimbursed.

People have long wondered if one of Amazongoals in video and advertising — two key areas in Amazonmedia strategy — ultimately would be to bring the two together, with Amazon-powered ads running in video streams also served by Amazon. A job ad in the UK appears to indicate that the company might be gearing up for such a play. According to the ad, company is currently hiring for someone to lead its efforts in free-to-air TV and advertising in Europe.

Free-to-air TV refers to the range of ad-supported (or TV license-supported) TV channels that you can access through a digital TV tuner, satellite or cable without paying anything to receive them.

The advertisement for the job when it was posted four weeks ago was titled, &Head of Free to Air TV - Advertising.& Yesterday, after people started noticing it (and what it implied about Amazonplans) Amazon appeared to change it to a slightly more muddled &Head of Prime Video Channels Free To Air TV - Advertising TV Partner Channels.& Then this morning, as we started asking questions, the title appeared to change again, to &Head of Prime Video Partner Channels& — without any reference to free-to-view or advertising. All the ads had the same job ID number.

This is notable because currently it appears that Amazon does not have any free-to-air channels on its UK service (and an Amazon spokesperson would not directly answer me on this point and declined to provide a comment on the record for this story), and italso gearing up to have some free significant sports content on its platform, in the form of Premier League football matches.

Amazoncurrent Prime Video offerings in the UK include films and TV shows it picks up by way of licensing deals with third parties; Amazon original content; and a selection oflivestreamed broadcast channels(which include HBO, Showtime and Starz for now, Discovery and Eurosport in the UK, as part of Amazon Channels, launched in March 2017). We&ve also heard it has been eyeing up buying at least one commerce-minded broadcaster outright. Globally, Prime Video is live in 200 countries worldwide.

But as with itsTV streams in the US, the TV streams in the Channels list are focused on premium subscriptions, where users have to pay extra fees, on top of their Prime subscriptions, to get the extra channels.

Offering free-to-air would be a significant move for the company not only because it would be &free&, but because it would represent a large jumpstart on the amount of content that Amazon presents to its users. Bringing in what are essentially table stakes in TV services, a large range of free channels could be another way of attracting more would-be cord cutters to switch over to Amazon for all of their video and TV interests, rather than using Amazonvideo offerings as a supplement to a core service from another provider.

And that, in turn, could become one more sweetener — alongside the other free video services, the free shipping, and many other perks — for people to pony up for the Prime annual subscription.

Amazon has never disclosed figures for how many viewers it has for its video service, in the UK or elsewhere, but a document leaked earlier this year that said it had 26 million viewers of its video content in early 2017. The company is estimated to be putting $5 billion per year into original content production and licensing content to drive more audience to its platforms, which it ties to its ultimate drive for more shopping on Amazon.

&When we win a Golden Globe, it helps us sell more shoes,& CEO Jeff Bezos has been quoted as saying.

That strategy is also playing out in the UK, where Amazon recently won the rights to stream 20 Premier League football matchesin the 2019/2020 season — which it will show to viewers at no extra charge, another twist on the &free to view.&

Amazon has not disclosed the price it paid, but as a point of comparisonBT is paying £975 million for 52 live games a season for three years, while Sky is paying £3.75 billion for 128 live games.

Ramping up the amount of streamed, free content on Amazonplatform will pave the way for the other part of the job Amazon is seeking to fill: advertising.

Currently, Amazon does not sell ads into any of the live streamed channels on its platform although some of them do run ads. However, if Amazon were to scale up the advertising opportunity by way of popular sports content and a wider range of free-to-air channels, suddenly the idea of creating its own TV-based ad network to inject ads into those various streams might be a little more compelling both to Amazon and would-be advertisers.

In the US, Amazon has dipped its toes in the waters by running ads during broadcasts of NFL games it had acquired the rights to broadcast — although by one account advertisers were paying up to $1 million less than Amazon had hoped they would for their packages.

Amazon has been quite gradual in building out its ads business. The company made $4 billion in advertising revenues in 2017, from a variety of services that range from native ads across third-party websites, through to banners on top of the Fire TV landing page and display units that run on Kindle devices. Its ad business is projected to make $9.5 billion in 2018. Relatively speaking, this is still modest in comparison to Google, which made $95 billion in advertising revenues in 2017.

But while Amazon slowly grows its ads business, italso chopping and changing, and it appears that one aim is to focus more on opportunities that speak to more scale for the business overall.

Just last week, we reported that Amazon quietly announced that it would be retiring an ad unit called CPM Ads, one of its earlier efforts in building a display network, which was aimed at smaller websites that were a part of its Associates program.