Insurance technology startup Roots Automation Inc. is looking to transform the industry with dedicated generative artificial intelligence models after closing on a new $22.2 million funding round.

Today’s Series B round was led by Harbert Growth Partners and saw participation from MissionOG, Liberty Mutual Strategic Ventures and Vestigo Ventures, which all made follow-on investments in the company.

Roots is the creator of an AI-powered Digital Coworker for insurance companies, which leverages its proprietary InsurGPT large language model to help automate much of the work they need to do.

Its Digital Coworker is built atop of InsurGPT and also taps into the capabilities of its Roots Autonomous Workforce platform to transform unstructured information into clear and actionable insights. Using it, the company says, insurance firms can make faster and better decisions on everything from premiums pricing to claims processing.

Roots explains that data is absolutely critical to insurance firms, yet they’re unable to use the vast majority of the information they collect. Something like 80% of all of the data gathered by insurers is unstructured information, such as email correspondence, legal demands, medical records and submissions. Because this information can’t be neatly arranged inside a traditional database, it’s almost impossible for traditional analytics tools to work with.

According to Roots, the inability to harness unstructured data costs insurance companies more than $100 billion annually because of underpriced premiums, overpaying claims and fraud.

By using AI to glean proper insights from all of this unstructured data, Roots reckons, it has delivered some impressive benefits for its 35 U.S. customers. They include a 97% reduction in handling times, 99% accuracy on data extraction, a 90% reduction in error rates on premium calculations and an 85% increase in claims processing capacity.

These benefits have led to “overwhelming demand” for Roots’ capabilities, the startup said, which is why it needs more capital to support its market expansion efforts and accelerate its product development.

Roots co-founder and Chief Executive Chaz Perera said unstructured data is an obstacle for every insurance company, third-party administrator, insurance broker and agent. “By freeing their teams from manual processes, we enable today’s top insurance brands to excel in their markets and concentrate on what really matters, providing impeccable service and exceptional care,” he said.

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