Today Luge Capital announced its investment in ProNavigator as part of a $5.6M financing round.
It’s not easy for companies to raise financing these days due to COVID-19 but ProNavigator did it and here’s why we invested alongside other great investors like GreenSky Capital, MaRS IAF, BDC, CIBC Innovation Banking, and inovia Capital.
Insurance carriers rely on insurance brokers as a distribution channel to sell insurance products and service their customers. Brokers rely on carriers to supply a gamut of information so that they can accurately represent their insurance products and generating business. Timely access to that information is essential for these partnerships to work. Unfortunately, information does not always flow quickly, especially today, as organizations struggle to keep up with the volume of inquiries from customers, brokers and, now, remote workers who can no longer turn to a colleague next to their desk for answers.
This is where ProNavigator comes in. Their technology is used to answer questions accurately and instantaneously without human intervention. Brokers often do business with many carriers and to find the right policy for their customers and answer their questions, they have to log into each carrier’s broker portal, find the most up to date PDF, download it and search using “Ctrl+F”. Keyword search simply does not work well. In many cases, the broker ends up calling the carriers’ underwriters or support specialists, or sends a message each time and waits for an answer. Believe it or not, support staff often use the same process in order to answer questions which opens a whole other market for the company.
A simple example is when a customer asks their insurance agent or broker “will I be covered if my road bike is stolen?”. The question seems simple, but getting the right answer is not. ProNavigator has direct connectivity to carriers gathering thousands of regularly updated policies and underwriting criteria documents. The system then ingests all of the content to securely return the right answer. Carriers also regularly update their insurance products and ProNavigator allows brokers to stay up to date with the latest policy and underwriting information.
What impressed investors participating in this financing round is the sophisticated and multilingual natural language processing (NLP) technology, proven accuracy of search results and traction with large customers deploying ProNavigator’s solution at scale. At Luge, we love the use of NLP and AI in financial services, but for it to work well it has to be trained and perfected. The broader the application the harder that is to do. ProNavigator has built a vertical-focused solution by continuously training its NLP specifically on insurance documents and data. Finally, we loved their vision to be the industry’s central source of truth where insurance organizations can easily store, find, manage, and distribute information.
Luge Capital is honored to have been selected by Joseph D’Souza and his team to be part of this great company. Joseph is a serial entrepreneur with deep product and technical expertise in his industry. With him in the driver’s seat, we’re certain the checkered flag is in our future.
