Planyear Inc., the developer of an artificial intelligence-enabled platform for healthcare benefits agents and insurance carriers, today announced it has raised $12 million in seed funding led by True Ventures.

The company said the funding will allow it to enhance its Beacon platform, which automates knowledge work and administrative drudgery that can take up to 70% of benefits consultants’ time.

Planyear was founded by industry veterans from healthcare brokerage who saw firsthand the frustration of using legacy systems and manually re-entering data from stacks of documents during crunch time.

Speaking to SiliconANGLE in an interview, Planyear Chief Executive Tariq Hilaly said that the health benefits industry has been “an absolute nightmare to fulfill” because of its outdated systems and reliance on unstructured data.

“Essentially, health insurance is not the most technology-forward industry,” Hilaly explained. “Believe it or not, APIs that have probably now been around for the last 30 years have not really reached the mainstream. They’re still using [Electronic Data Interchange] as a method of data exchange from the 1980s.”

The computer-to-computer protocol behind EDI was developed to replace paper-based formats so companies can exchange documents and data in a standard electronic format. Its origins are rooted in the United States transportation industry, which wanted to standardize invoicing and purchase orders. It is an old but reliable and evolving standard that is still being modernized to run through cloud-based platforms and use application programming interface integrations.

The benefits consulting industry manages over $1.4 trillion in annual healthcare spending, yet remains bogged down by tremendous human effort to reconcile disparate information sources.

Hilaly described the benefits industry as “brutal” during renewal season, when most plans turn over at once. With 65% to 70% of clients renewing around Jan. 1, he said consultants are buried in paperwork, spreadsheets and back-and-forth emails — often working through holidays to keep up.

“Christmas and Thanksgiving didn’t exist anymore,” he said of his own brokerage experience, comparing it to accountants racing toward tax day.

Planyear’s AI-driven platform helps cut through the heavy lifting of information gathering, support requests and benefits planning. When done manually, these tasks can take hours per client. Healthcare broker agents often juggle dozens of documents, standardize data from multiple sources, and must produce branded communications such as benefits microsites and support materials.

“We can reduce content creation time by about 95% and data entry by about 75%,” Hilaly said. “If you free people from that, they can actually work with their clients on more strategic issues, which is ultimately what they really want to do.”

Hilaly mentioned that Planyear currently supports eight of the top 20 brokerage firms, although he did not disclose their names. He explained that the company initially focused on smaller enterprises but discovered that large firms experience the same challenges.

“AI has begun to transform the underlying economics of insurance brokerage,” said Craig Hasday, president of national employee benefits practice at EPIC Insurance Brokers & Consultants. “Using AI, firms will increase the efficiency and accuracy of their interaction with clients and insurance carriers with significantly improved control of data and awareness of pricing and coverage trends.”

The company’s platform also provides an AI assistant that can answer employee benefits questions automatically, rather than passing them along to a human representative. According to Planyear, its system can resolve around 57% of employee questions on a 24/7 basis, with the rest escalated for human support.

With the new funding, Hilaly said the company will expand the platform to address additional pain points for benefits professionals and deepen its support for employers, general agents and carriers. As a seed-stage company, Planyear aims to expand its sales team and further develop its AI products to keep up with rapid technological changes and prepare for future capabilities.

“When it comes right down to it, what we are is a native AI-enabled platform for insurance brokers to turbocharge their entire workflows,” Hilaly said.

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