SHANGHAI, Jan. 14, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Recently, Shanghai Leapstack Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as Leapstack), an insurtech company, announced that it had raised a Series C round of 150 million yuan. This round of fundraising was led by Legend Capital, followed by Peakview Capital, GF Qianhe Investment and Huazhi Capital, with Mountain View Capital acting as the fundraising consultant.
In recent years, insurtech companies are embracing a more "automated" future with open arms amid the digital transformation of the insurance industry, especially healthcare insurance. Cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence and big data are transforming every area of the insurance value chain, including products, pricing, channels, operations, underwriting and claims settlement.
Among them, RPA (Robot Process Automation), which mimics and enhances the way humans interact with software to perform repetitive, standardized and high-volume tasks, has become one of the powerful tools to accelerate the digital transformation of the insurance industry.
Founded in 2016, Leapstack is the explorer of "RPA + AI" in healthcare insurance in China, offering services to regulatory bodies such as commercial insurance companies, medical insurance bureaus and audit departments with enterprise-level big data risk control solutions through the one-stop intelligent risk control platform powered by RPA+AI.
Up to now, Leapstack has inked close partnerships with hundreds of companies, including China Life Insurance, PICC, China Taiping, CPIC, China Insurance, Ping An Insurance, Taikang Insurance, China Continent Insurance, Sunshine Insurance, AIA, AXA, CITIC Prudential Life Insurance, Sun Life Everbright Life Insurance, Generali China, Foresea Life Insurance, Hyundai Insurance, Hannover Re, China Merchants Bank, ICBC Technology, Merck Sharp & Dohme, BeiGene, CIIC, Jiang Tai Insurance Broker, Huatai Insurance Agency & Consultant Service, Shuidi Insurance, Easy Raising (Qingsongchou), Yidu Cloud, WeDoctor, Medbanks, Yuanxin Technology, Xiaomi Insurance, and Shanghai Insurance Exchange.
Empowering Intelligent Risk Control in Health Insurance with "RPA + AI"
As one of the digital transformation trends for enterprises, RPA has been attracting increasing attention from global capital in recent years. McKinsey revealed that the global RPA market is forecast to grow to 100 billion US dollars in 2025, with an annual rate of 64%, becoming one of the fastest-growing technologies in AI related fields.
In April this year, UiPath, a global RPA head manufacturer, was listed on the New York Stock Exchange, marking one of the largest software IPOs in U.S. history, with a market value of over 26 billion US dollars. The successful IPO of UiPath again attracted venture capital funds to pile into RPA in China. The statistics of business cards suggest that there have been 13 financing events in China's RPA sector this year, double that of 2020, with more than 1 billion yuan raised.
As for the insurance industry, despite broad prospects, domestic healthcare insurance in particular, is plagued by low penetration, high operating costs, high compensation risks, and lack of standardized data formats for availability, placing mounting pressure on relevant participants.
On the one hand, payment pressure of domestic medical insurance increases resulting from impacts such as aging population and rising medical expenses, causing medium-to-long-term sustainability risks. Therefore, the government has given the top priority to curbing the spending of healthcare insurance in the latest round of medical reform. On the other hand, for fast-growing commercial health insurance, controlling spending while expanding the scale is the key to improving the sustainability of products.
Therefore, controlling the spending of healthcare and commercial insurance has become a matter of concern among all parties in the industry.
In such a context, Leapstack, by employing "RPA + AI", has built multiple platforms such as intelligent claim management platform for health insurance, intelligent investigation, intelligent audit of government healthcare coverage, long-term care intelligent management platform, big data anti-money laundering platform, big data governance platform, etc. Aside from providing the whole-process claim settlement and risk control services for commercial insurance and reinsurance institutions and insurance brokerage companies, Leapstack can also provide intelligent risk control, fund management, intelligent audit, data governance, anti-money laundering and other services for medical insurance departments, audit institutions and banks, and decision-making assistance for relevant policy formulation and adjustment.
Taking health insurance claims as an example. As traditional insurance claims require a wide range of time-consuming manual tasks such as reporting, information extraction and adjustment, such insurance claims are often error-prone and inefficient. The automated claims adjustment engine provided by Leapstack follows the custom rules of insurance companies and supports automated determination of reimbursement coverage and amount, which shortens the claim time, improves operational efficiency and reduces manual errors.
"At present, "RPA + AI" technology has been applied to the entire healthcare insurance claims process. Empowered by "RPA + AI", Leapstack integrated each link of claims process including case reporting, information extraction, adjustment, fee calculation, etc." said Jason Liu, the founder of Leapstack.
Additionally, Leapstack developed a machine learning model and medical knowledge map to cater to needs of underwriting, claim settlement, customer service, and investigation in different types of insurance such as medical treatment and serious illness. These products support effective detection of the risk points in the process of underwriting and claims settlement at the data level, and precise cost control of all core links of insurance. Its big data and AI empower insurance pricing reversely and predict the risks of different combinations of liability clauses in insurance products accurately, thus diversifying products and expanding the scope of underwriting users.
As Top-notch Professionalism Has Earned Growing Capital, Leapstack Is Well-positioned to Gain a Strong Foothold in Asia-Pacific
Since its establishment, Leapstack has completed several rounds of fundraising, with shareholders including Gaorong Capital, Fomou Assets, DCM, Puhua Capital, Danhua Capital, Lingfeng Capital, FinVolution Group (NYSE:FINV), Uphonest Capital, 360 DigiTech (NASDAQ: QFIN), Huazhi Capital and GF Qianhe Investment, etc.
As for the reasons behind the growing capital that Leapstack received, Jason emphasized that the key lies in "comprehensiveness". This includes not only technical prowess, team members, but also brand influence.
Start with technology.
RPA + AI technology is one of the advantages enjoyed by Leapstack. Nevertheless, Jason argued that "Though technology is important, it's not the most important. The key is to find suitable scenarios where technology can be applied, and then make refinements as the business grows. Despite almost six years of growth, Leapstack has only carried out preliminary application of the technical concept and framework of RPA + AI in some specific scenarios, and there is still much room for growth in the future and time is required for constant refinements."
Second, the core team of Leapstack. The founding team is from top technology companies in Silicon Valley, with a core team composed of senior technical experts, insurance professionals and medical doctors. The team has rich experience in artificial intelligence, big data, cloud computing technology and insurance risk control.
When it comes to future business layout, Jason said that Leapstack would continue to gain a stronghold in the Asia-Pacific insurance market while expanding domestic market presence. By the end of 2018, Leapstack established Leapstack International Headquarters in Hong Kong, and joined Hong Kong Cyberport and InvestHK Project. Starting from the Hong Kong market, Leapstack International has spent three years exploring the application of RPA + AI in the Asia-Pacific insurance market. At present, stable partnerships have been established in Hong Kong, Singapore, Vietnam and Thailand, and the risk control model and RPA + AI system have been successfully applied in local commercial insurance companies and medical insurance regulators.
"For Leapstack, our next step is to make a push to expand the Asia-Pacific market, especially in Southeast Asia and other countries where business has started to grow. Steady efforts will be made to launch a world-class insurance platform empowered by RPA + AI, a risk control model and better operational service capabilities." Jason revealed.
