(Image source: owl.co homepage.)
owl.co Labs, Inc. (owl.co) (Vancouver, B.C.), an insurance claims monitoring platform, has secured $30 million in Series B funding. Cota Capital (San Francisco) led the financing, joined by Sorenson Ventures, FUSE, Impression Ventures, Luge Capital, and Plug and Play Ventures. owl.co says it will utilize the funding to scale its insurance claims monitoring platform and expand its team. owl.co reports that it plans to increase its full-time staff in the U.S. and Canada by 20 percent before the end of 2021, with additional hiring planned for 2022. This latest round of financing brings the company’s overall funding to $40 million.
Sean Merat, Co-Founder and CEO, owl.co.
“This funding will help us expand owl. co’s platform to revolutionize the insurance industry’s process for monitoring claims and mitigating fraud to address the $80 billion cost to American consumers,” comments Sean Merat, co-founder and CEO, owl.co. “By leveraging machine learning to automate and remove bias from the process, we are blazing the trail to a future where nobody pays for fraud.”
According to the FBI, insurance fraud costs the average U.S. family $400-700 per year in the form of increased premiums. owl.co says its claims monitoring platform enables insurance providers to stop unwarranted claim payments, release reserves, and adjust expenses, helping keep premiums down, ultimately saving consumers money. The platform automatically detects significant losses from malingering, exaggerated, or non-eligible claims at a rate five times greater than any other tool. The vendor reports that six of the 10 largest U.S. insurers have already engaged with owl.co to automate their fraud detection and claims monitoring processes.
owl.co reports that, unlike other providers, it does not use claimant data such as age, gender, neighborhood stats, or race, in its models to determine eligibility, in order to eliminate biases. owl.co’s platform flags potential fraud, letting organizations prioritize and deprioritize claims. owl. co’s solution currently addresses ineligible disability and workers’ compensation insurance claims.
PV Boccosam, Partner, Cota Capital.
“We are excited to partner with owl.co, who is a leader in advancing the digitization of claims in the insurance industry,” comments PV Boccosam, partner, Cota Capital. “Delivering a clear ROI to insurance carriers gives us high conviction that owl.co’s AI-driven approach can maximize value creation for its customers.”
In 2020, owl.co was awarded a co-investment of CAD$4.5 million from the Canadian government as part of the country’s Innovation Superclusters Initiative. The program encourages industry leaders to collaborate on large-scale projects to speed up growth in what it deems some of Canada’s most promising industries.