AI breakthroughs 'levelling the playing field', says Adaptional's Kantaria after $10 million seed round

(The Insurer) - Breakthroughs in AI even over the last six months are “levelling the playing field” among tech firms, said Adaptional CEO Suril Kantaria, whose firm aims to transform insurance underwriting using new reasoning models.

Kantaria said Adaptional's autopilot for insurance underwriters addresses a significant pain point in the industry.

"When we talk to our customers, they tell us that 80% of underwriters’ time today is spent doing manual data processing work that they don't want to be doing," Kantaria told The Insurer TV at this month’s Insurtech Insights USA conference in New York City.

Adaptional's platform accelerates insurance underwriting through three main components: intake and triage, research for validation and enrichment, and analysis for risk assessment.

"We're seeing, I think, a levelling of the playing field, if you will, amongst technology companies," Kantaria explained.

"We've been in RFPs with customers, where they pitted us against more legacy companies, system of record companies, AI startups, (and) we have not yet lost a single RFP," Kantaria said.

San Francisco-based Adaptional has been operational for about a year and already serves several large MGAs and carriers focused on commercial insurance. It recently completed a $10 million Y Combinator-led seed funding round.

"Even six months ago, this technology did not exist,” said Kantaria, who previously worked on the transition team at Twitter following its takeover by Elon Musk.

“And specifically it's not (that) … LLMs are very new, and the latest crop of AI models are new, but specifically reasoning models are, I think, a major unlock for the insurance industry," he added.