Tiger Global-backed insurance start-up Plum launches AI-powered tool PolicyGPT for investors

Bengaluru-based insurtech start-up Plum has floated an AI-powered tool called PolicyGPT, which aims to provide customers with educational information about their policies by chatting with a bot in the natural language. Created using the OpenAI GPT-3 architecture, PolicyGPT is designed to provide users with information about their health insurance policy purchased from Plum. 

Talking about PolicyGPT, Saurabh Arora, Chief Technology Officer and Co-founder of Plum, said that technologies such as this have the potential to revolutionise the insurance industry. “AI is definitely an interesting technology that will find more use cases in customer education and assistance to make insurance more accessible to laymen. With PolicyGPT, members can now get instant answers to their health insurance coverage questions, learn about inclusions and exclusions and expand their knowledge about policies,” he said. 

GPT is a Transformer-based architecture and training procedure for natural language processing tasks. GPT-3 can create anything with a text structure -- not just human language text. It can also generate text summarizations and even programming code.  

ChatGPT uses state-of-the-art deep learning algorithms and natural language processing to understand and generate human-like responses to user queries. 

Arora added that innovative technology can make insurance less ‘hairy’ and has thereby launched several other features like WhatsApp claims, paperless reimbursements and also recently unveiled its mobile app that currently ranks at 4.1 on Android and 4.3 on iOS, respectively. 

“PolicyGPT is a game changer for Plum and the insurance industry. Its seamless service bridges the gaps that insurance companies currently face in terms of customer service and response time. PolicyGPT is different from other insurance tools because it is an AI-powered educator, enhancer, and assistant,” Arora added. 

In November last year, Plum said it will be laying off 10 per cent of its workforce. The insurtech start-up said that it is “committed to extending all possible support to the employees during this period which includes severance pay, healthcare benefits, well-being counseling, ESOP vesting, and dedicated placement and career support.” 

Back in May 2021, Plum raised $15.7 million in a Series A round led by Tiger Global, Sequoia Surge, and others. Overall, the start-up has raised $20.7 million, including via seed and angel rounds. It also counts prominent founders including Kunal Shah of CRED, Gaurav Munjal and Roman Saini of Unacademy, and Harsh Jain of Dream11, among its investors. 

The insurance start-up claimed to have clocked Rs 300 crore in annual premium, and registered 700 per cent growth in FY22. Over the last two years, it also recorded an increase in the average sum insured in its policies from Rs 3 lakh to Rs 5 lakh per family.

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