Columbus, OH - As expectations for faster and more precise underwriting expand, a new technology startup has developed an innovative, breakthrough technology to help insurers deal with this challenge and is getting support from Nationwide’s venture capital team.

Nationwide is announcing a venture capital investment in Planck, a company transforming the commercial insurance data space by providing an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven data platform. The funding comes from Nationwide’s $100 million venture capital investment fund.

“AI assists underwriters in making faster and more efficient decisions, which accelerates the underwriting process and frees them up to spend time on things like rethinking coverage needs for their customers or building stronger broker and agent relationships,” said Tony Fenton Nationwide’s vice-president of Commercial Digitization and New Product Development. “Nationwide recognizes the potential of AI data technology to help carriers and agents keep up with customer demands for efficiency and accuracy.”

Founded in 2016, Planck leverages deep industry expertise and breakthrough data science to streamline the commercial producing processes - providing real-time data insights for the entire small-and-medium business segments across the United States.

For commercial insurance carriers and agents, getting a comprehensive look at a business is pivotal to ensuring they are providing the most complete coverage and protection to business owners as possible, with minimal effort. In order to meet the agents’ and customers’ ever-changing needs and expectations, carriers need to simplify the submission and underwriting processes in order to provide faster and more accurate quotes without compromising their models or ability to assess the risk properly.

Planck’s technology has proven its ability to more quickly and precisely underwrite risk for major business segments and insurance lines, including:

• restaurants, bars and taverns
• contractors
• beauty salons
• staffing
• manufacturing
• insurance lines such as Workers Compensation, General liability, Employment Practice Liability, Business Owner Policy and more

“After assessing several companies in the marketplace, we quickly determined Planck’s AI platform provides faster and more consistent data for commercial insurers like Nationwide,” said Erik Ross, leader of Nationwide’s venture capital and mergers and acquisitions teams. “We’re impressed with the founding team’s experience building value for insuretech companies and look forward to supporting Planck’s growth.”

Elad Tsur, Planck CEO, and co-founder says: “In today’s world, up-to-date and relevant data insights are more important than ever and it is Planck’s mission to provide real-time data about any business in the world to increase underwriting efficiency and achieve better risk assessment. We are very excited to have strong backing from the investment arm of one of the top insurance leaders.”

Nationwide’s venture capital team has made several recent investments, including Deep Sentinel, Vesta Healthcare, KINETIC, Upstream Security, Socotra, Betterview, Nexar, BlueVine, blooom, Insurify, Next Insurance, Matic and Sure.

Nationwide’s partnerships through venture capital 

In addition to Nationwide’s venture capital investment efforts, the company has several notable partnerships within the portfolio, including:

● In November 2019, Nationwide announced a three-year commercial agreement with with Betterview. Betterview is quickly becoming the platform essential to every transaction around buildings and properties, enabling the insurance carrier to utilize Betterview's predictive roof analytics and risk management platform for commercial property renewals.

● In September 2019, Nationwide launched Spire - a simple, easy-to-understand digital auto insurance platform, built on fair and straightforward principles and designed to be convenient and accessible from your phone. Spire chose portfolio company Socotra as the core system to power its new digital insurance platform.

● In May 2019, Nationwide partnered with small business lender BlueVine, and launched the “Pitch to Win” small business contest, which awarded more than $100,000 to small business owners.

About Planck

Planck provides an AI-based data platform for commercial insurance, working with top US insurance companies helping them increase premiums while reducing loss and expense ratios. Its mission is to empower commercial insurers by generating insights that streamline the commercial underwriting process, enabling insurers to instantly and accurately underwrite any policy. Planck was founded by a team of serial entrepreneurs with an extensive background in insurance and technology. For more information, visit https://planckdata.com/.