A Bangalore-based insurtech startup, Fedo, has raised $1 million in its pre-series A financing round led by Indian VC firm, Unicorn India Ventures. The funding round also saw participation from SEA Fund and Ashish Mehrotra, former CEO at Max Bupa. The startup will use the capital to “enhance the computer vision capabilities for enhanced non-invasive identification of health risks usable in various use cases requiring health assessment and to co-create personalized insurance products”.
“India is one of the most under-insured countries in the World. A big reason for this is that many people may want to take insurance but they don’t know which product works for them or covers ailments. Fedo has the capability to deploy AI and assess your health-related risks. With COVID situation entering into the community stage in India and coming back in the 2nd wave in other large countries, the awareness about getting a health cover is on the rise. Insurtech players like Fedo are positioned right to leverage this trend,” said Anil Joshi, Managing Partner, Unicorn India Ventures.
Founded in 2017 by Prasanth Madavana and Arun Mallavarapu, Fedo is an ‘artificial intelligence-enabled health risk and insurance tracker’ that provides insights into the health risks of an individual. Its AI/ML algorithms use a combination of health risk and claim propensity scores to calculate the risk for an individual to contract various diseases. It uses the “Fedo Score” to determine the health score and risks of an individual by posing some questions to them. The data from Fedo’s AI/Machine Learning and computer vision helps insurers to boost sales, reduce costs and enrich the quality of their portfolio.
Fedo says that the Fedo Score has been developed with the help of medical professionals and data scientists using 250 plus medical studies, 1.5M claims and over 50 million global health records. Apart from calculating health risks, Fedo also works with the health departments of local governments in India and abroad to determine population risk predictions.
Prasanth Madavana, co-founder of Fedo said, “Our vision is to offer AI-backed solutions to insurance providers, which enables early identification of potential health risks by using non invasive methods thereby reducing out of pocket expenditures of individuals and making insurance accessible, affordable and personalised.”
The insurtech startup has partnered with multiple insurers across the globe, including Sachin Bansal backed CoCo General Insurance. With the new funds, Fedo looks to expand globally, starting with South East Asia and Australia this year. It is also focussing on launching the first-ever image-based underwriting platform which will help reduce the time for insurance onboarding to within a minute.
“Fedo’s AI enables the insurers to seamlessly onboard, track and manage product portfolios with customer level insights and predictive models. This will significantly simplify and enhance profitability and lifetime value for the insurers,” said Ashish Malhotra.
The investment from Unicorn India Ventures comes from its Rs. 400 crore Fund II launched last year. The Fund II marked its first close in March this year at $12 million and has made investments in five companies to date.
