MassChallenge is the largest startup accelerator in the world
The Boston Insurtech scene continues to pick up the pace with a new event next week hosted by the accelerator MassChallenge. Dubbed “The Future of Insurtech” the event is scheduled for Tuesday, December 6th from 5:30PM to 8:00PM and will take place at the MassChallenge offices located at 23 Drydock Ave in the Seaport District.
According to the schedule of events, 15 different startups as well as a panel of experts will all present during the evening event.
Here is a time-line of the event:
- 5:30PM–6:15PM Startup Showcase/Networking
- 6:15PM-6:30PM Introduction, Craig Copland, SVP, Digital Catalyst Lead (IoT)
- 6:30PM-6:45PM One Minute Startup & Corporation Pitches
- 6:45PM-7:45PM Panel Discussion and Q&A
While the event Moderator has yet to be announced, the Panelist will be
- Ace Moghimi, John Hancock’s Global Head of Innovation Strategy & Delivery,
- Murli Buluswar, AIG’s Chief Science Officer;
- Chris Cheatham, CEO & Founder of RiskGenius
A look at the participating startups attending the inaugural event
While Agency Checklists is familiar with a couple of the startups, we thought it would be instructive to do a short synopsis of each of the 15 companies that plan on presenting Tuesday night. The following are the elevator pitches of each of the 15 companies slated to speak.
bosWell–Aristotle Mannan, Founder and CEO
The sickest 5% of Medicaid patients–the “super-utilizers”–drive 50% of costs. Most are afflicted by social/environmental determinants and rely on community-based organizations (CBOs) as touch points for survival. bosWell offers CBOs a free, web-based application to address client management needs and assess for risk factors. The collected data is used to prospectively identify vulnerable individuals for preventive interventions, thereby creating value for their associated health plans.
CAKE–Suelin Chen, Ph.D. and Mark Zang, D.O., Co-Founders
CAKE (joincake.com) is the easiest way to think about end-of-life. 100% of people die, but three out of four of us do not plan for it, which can lead to emotional, physical, and financial suffering. Our first-in-class, mobile-friendly web app helps users discover their end-of-life preferences and store and share them online. In addition to the free app, we offer personalized concierge services with end-of-life planning experts. CAKE empowers and simplifies. CAKE used to be called My Exit Strategy.
CARPEDATA–Max Drucker, CEO & President
Carpe Data provides next generation predictive scoring and data products to P&C and life insurance companies. Leveraging the social web, online content, wearables, connected devices, and other forms of next generation data, Carpe Data’s products enable insurers to more accurately predict risk and innovate with new products to meet changing customer habits.
ClaimKit–Chris Cheatham and Doug Reiser, Co-Founders
ClaimKit’s mission is simple: to make claim professionals happier and more productive through better technology. Started in 2011 by two claim attorneys tired of messy claim files and bad software, the duo created a team of diverse technology professions to revolution the long-neglected claim industry. The fruit of their labors culminated with the release of DocKit in 2012, hailed as the first surety-focused claim document management software. In 2015, the company improved upon its mission with the release of Privity, a full workflow claim data management system.
InsuranceMenu–Nabil Aidoud and Mason Harding, Co-Founders
InsuranceMenu was born out of an innovative legislative mandate passed in Massachusetts in 2010. A coalition of small business advocates and policymakers saw a real need to address rising healthcare costs for such a significant part of the labor force. InsuranceMenu co-founders Nabil Aidoud and Mason Harding were part of that team. In those years, Nabil and Mason saw first hand how valuable the local agent was to many of these small businesses and how the administrative burden only added to the frustration and costs of offering employees benefits. After working with hundreds of small businesses and their agents, the formative seeds of InsuranceMenu were sown. In 2014, Nabil and Mason started working with a leading agency and a number of progressive insurers to design a new way of handling benefits for small business that took the unique needs of this market and brought new innovative private exchange technology to enhance and empower the vital agent/employer relationship.
Insurify–Snejina Zacharia, Founder and CEO
Insurify is the first online car insurance shopping platform, which instantly verifies your customer data to provide intuitive and integrated user experience. We believe that the only way to help people feel comfortable shopping for insurance online is if we can build the brain of a super agent behind our platform. We analyze millions of records, identify patterns and build models to match to your profile. Based on these models, we provide our personalized recommendation to help you make the most confident decision about your coverage and choice of carrier. Our data driven approach helps you save time and money on your insurance every year. How we help you with your car insurance shopping.
True Motion–Scott Griffith, CEO, Joe Adelmann, VP of Operations and Brad Cordova, CTO, Co-Founders
We are combining easy-to-use technology and smart data science to make it easier for people to become safer drivers; Measure. Powerful sensor technology and signal processing accurately captures driver behavior. Score. Advanced data science and machine learning score drivers on key indicators. Improve. Insurers reward safe driving habits and improve risky ones.
Water Hero–Dan Sterling, Founder and CEO
For the home owner, a pipe burst or leak can be a nightmare involving temporary housing, contractors, demolition, structural reinforcement, mandatory building code upgrades, and the loss of irreplaceable possessions, photos, and heirlooms.
Property insurance may cover much of the financial loss for the homeowner, but what of the situation for their insurers? The American Insurance Association estimates that water claims represent 23% of all property losses reported by homeowners, with annual US losses in excess of $9 billion. Globally, losses paid by insurers are estimated at over $25 billion each year
Water Hero helps prevent damage from plumbing catastrophes.
The Water Hero system makes use of a homeowner’s existing WiFi network to collect water usage information in the Cloud, down to a per-second level. Simple profile information provided by the user allows Water Hero to start looking for unusual water flows that may indicate a leak. When it detects abnormal water usage, a homeowner receives a warning message via a text message. Unless the homeowner instructs otherwise, Water Hero will activate a motorized valve to shut off the water, protecting your home and your family.
KodiakData–Som Sikdar, CEO
Kodiak Data’s mission is to make Big Data clusters fast, simple and cost effective. The team has deep technical expertise in networking, storage, compute and virtualization. The core technology is revolutionary and has been developed and patented. The products are now being deployed and evaluated by industry leaders.
Kodiak has developed a suite of Virtual Cluster Infrastructure (VCI) software that virtualizes compute, networking and storage for clusters–not single machines. Each cluster is fully containerized into a DataContainer that includes your complete software stack, along with the compute, networking and storage to go with it. Many DataContainers and tenants can run on a shared infrastructure with the Kodiak VCI fabric software, a cluster-level hypervisor.
Nanotech Galaxy – Alexandros Louizos, M.D., MSc
The company says its vision is to accelerate the impact of population healthcare with the use of prognostic artificial intelligence. This is done through Nanotech Galaxy’s algorith compares each patient’s medical data with thousands of similar cases. This allows our brain
inspired architectures to provide personalized metrics on each patient.
Hive Maritime – Brian Kirk and Chris Mannion, Co-Founders
Hive Maritime was founded when two former Navy Officers discussed their frustrations with poor ship efficiency during a data analytics class at MIT. Using their maritime domain experience, they built a strong network within the shipping industry and quickly realized the huge opportunity to solve some of the biggest operational challenges in international trade. Adding an active service US Army operative with a strong focus on sustainability to the team, Hive Maritime was incorporated in 2015 and began working on developing a solution. The team has since expanded with high quality technical expertise from an MIT Operations Research Center PhD candidate and an Atmospheric Science PhD.
Noex – Scott Bonney, EIT
Noex DOT (Data on Therapy) is a wearable device designed to passively monitor and track the activity of an individual regaining range of motion after injury or surgery. While DOT is worn, it provides the patient with statistics on their range of motion progress and gives clinicians hard data on the patient’s activity outside the office. Patients benefit from increased awareness on their recovery and the motivation it offers; clinicians are able to provide more effective and specialized care.
Sybil Security – Uri Braun, Founder and CEO
Sybil Security uses a new algorithm that turns data security on its head: you can share more data, more widely, more privately. What is more you can audit privacy compliance automatically–without any person needing to see the original data. We target large regulated enterprises primarily in healthcare, consumer finance and government.
TapLink – Jeremy Spilman, Founder & CTO
Imagine you could join a Password Defense League where your users’ passwords are immediately secured by the total combined resources of sites all across the internet. Blind Hashing allows sites to effectively pool their resources into a common defense fund for securing passwords.
We provide an additive layer of security which works in conjunction with your existing password defenses, systems and processes. You maintain complete control over your data, your users, and your authentication process, with no lock-in.
TellusLabs – David Potere, PhD, Co-founder & CEO and Professor Mark Friedl, Co-Founder and CTO
We turn satellite imagery and other Earth data into the basis for better decisions.
At TellusLabs, we are convinced that providing planet-wide coverage of our farms, forests, and water that is accurate, timely, and localized will change what is possible in tackling some of our toughest collective challenges. Insights fueled by spaceborne imagery are key to this vision. Yet today building meaningful signals from global-scale satellite imagery and other Earth data is harder than it should be.
Our team of data scientists, engineers, and geographers is building the Argus platform, a simple, efficient, and repeatable system for monitoring and forecasting the health of our natural systems. Our team and process runs fast, moving from concept to prototype models on timescales measured in weeks not years. Some of the first such models to emerge from our pipeline now form the basis for Kernel – our flagship premium data product.
XactSense – Andy Trench, Founder and CEO
XactSense builds fully autonomous, 3D Laser scanning Drones which allow our customer to get more data, at half the cost, and 1/5 the time of existing methods. The XactSense MAX-8 Utility UAV [Unmanned Aerial Vehicle] can lift over 15 pounds and can be fitted with a wide variety of sensor payloads.
Photo mapping (Photogrammetry) is the fastest way for first-time UAV users to learn autonomous functions of any system. Our MAX-8 offers the beginner and experienced pilot a great way to start mapping while also giving the user a fast path to making a return on their investment. Our Photo Mapping Package will get you flying and delivering insight to your customer in a short time.
Photo Mapping delivers high resolution Ortho-Rectfied aerial imagery as well as 3D Point Cloud or Meshed 3D Model for the survey and inspection of critical infrastructure, such as wind turbines, bridges, oil/gas pipelines, and power-lines.
Human Condition Network–No further information is available
About MassChallenge per its self-description
MassChallenge is the most startup-friendly accelerator on the planet. No equity and not-for-profit, we are obsessed with helping entrepreneurs across any industry. We also reward the highest-impact startups through a competition to win a portion of several million dollars in equity-free cash awards. Through our global network of accelerators in Boston, London, Jerusalem, Lausanne and Mexico City and unrivaled access to our corporate partners, we can have a massive impact – driving growth and creating value the world over.
Our Objectives
- Promote innovation, collaboration and commercialization;
- Address the seed-stage investment gap, empowering novice entrepreneurs;
- Provide educational opportunities for entrepreneurs; and
- Showcase entrepreneurship assets and infrastructure locally, nationally and internationally
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