London’s Sprout raises £8 million, responds to global demand, presses forward with R&D

London-based insurance platform Sprout.ai has raised £8 million in a Series A round.

Led by one of Europe’s most active early-stage investors, Octopus Ventures, existing investors Amadeus Capital Partners, Playfair Capital, and Techstars participated.

The funding is expected to further propel R&D projects as well as recruit additional talent.

“Sprout.ai’s technology has gained traction fast since we made our seed investment. The company’s product development in document reading and natural language processing has been impressive,” comments Amadeus Capital Partners’ Amelia Armour.

Founded in 2018 by Niels Thoné and Raphael Guth, Sprout.ai is a practical application of a lot of terms you've most probably heard time and time again, AI, NLP, and OCR. That’s Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, and Optical Character Recognition for the uninitiated, but you knew that already, didn't you?

By combining these elements, Sprout’s technology is able to read, contextualise, and action insurance claims and facilitates a settlement within 24 hours or less. 

In a world where an insurance claim can drag on and on, by putting all the technology pieces together in the right order, and refining and specifically tailoring the process to the insurance industry, Sprout has developed a workflow that would “normally” take around 30 days to now under 30 hours.

Faster claim settlement, happier customers.

This dramatic time (and money) saving process hasn’t gone unnoticed by some of the biggest insurers in the world.

“At Zurich we are constantly looking for innovative ways to enhance a customer’s experience when a claim occurs. Customers expect fast, clear and transparent handling of their claims and by partnering with Sprout not only are we helping meet this expectation for our customers but importantly supporting our staff too by providing them with market-leading technology,” comments Will Paskins from insurance giant Zurich.

Sprout reports a significant increase in demand for their product since the beginning of the pandemic and is now heavily active in Europe, South America, and the APAC region.

“By combining document processing and contextualisation, we have created a vastly superior technical product, making us strongly placed as the market leader. We’ve already seen exceptional levels of interest from global insurers in the last 12 months, who are increasingly looking to automate their claims journey,” adds Sprout.ai CEO Niels Thoné.

Lead Image: Nick Morrish