Why we invested in Lazarus AI
- QBE Ventures has made a strategic investment in Lazarus AI, a deep tech start-up that is helping to solve some of the hardest problems using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Computer Vision.
- Lazarus AI is powered by a proprietary, enterprise-grade data and document ingestion, decision and reasoning engine. Their team and novel foundation model architecture are demonstrating success at scale in supporting highly sensitive, complex planning and intelligence led analysis.
- Our view is that an AI powered decisioning and reasoning engine is one part of a coming wave of AI capabilities to include Agentic workflows and Small Language Models for regulated industries.
The Opportunity
At QBE Ventures, we identify emerging trends that could disrupt and or transform the insurance industry. In September, OpenAI released o1-Preview. This release is less than two years after ChatGPT (GPT3-5) hit the market and accumulated over 100m active users within two months. We don’t expect the pace of change to slow down, as reflected in Venture Capital deals, with over 40% of money invested in the first half of 2024 going to AI companies. The OpenAI o1 models are the first public models that use ‘Chain-Of-Thought’ reasoning baked into the model itself. This is a significant milestone and marks the start of a new era for insurance, as using AI to solve complex problems involving large volumes of unstructured data (e.g. photos, imagery, text, audio) has previously been unattainable.
AI is a general-purpose technology, and we are in the early stages of industry specialisation. We are already moving beyond the first wave of productionised use cases in insurance, which we categorise as rapid information summarisation, with QBE’s Cyber Underwriting Assistant tool being one example of this. Portfolio companies CLARA Analytics, Cytora and HyperScience have similarly reported early quick wins and productivity gains from customers. Indeed, it was the relative speed and ease of building the QBE solution that convinced the QBE Ventures team of the importance of being an industry leader in this space, and ensuring QBE is well positioned.
Our view is the next wave of capabilities released will include agentic services en-masse. AI agents will orchestrate multiple tasks within a business process flow and augment horizontal enterprise services like customer support, sales, marketing and engineering. Within regulated industries we are likely to see a wider AI ecosystem release of Small Language Models (SLMs). These SLMs will address enterprise vertical tasks that require high precision, greater security, and consume less computational power. The key focus for QBE Ventures is verticalization. Insurance is a highly specialised industry, with a long tail of use cases.
QBE Ventures is looking for best-in-class players focused on the unique problems facing sensitive workloads in regulated industries.
Introducing Lazarus AI
Originating in Healthcare, Lazarus AI is an early-stage deep tech company that has unique capability in foundational models and computer vision for regulated entities and government departments.
Lazarus AI can plan, research, and then coordinate the execution of a collection of tasks using a variety of language models and digital environments to complete the stated objective. This has the potential to transform business operations that require an analytical approach and evidence-based decision making.
Lazarus AI has flown under the radar to date but even so, has found its products being adopted by leading global insurers. They have three core products, but the game-changing capability resides in ‘ATLS’ - a multi-modal, multi-step information reasoning and decisioning engine. The solution can identify and interpret ‘handwritten’ and ‘typed’ data, video, and images to enable a user to explore, investigate and probe for anomalies (for an example, watch their video).
It is one part of a full stack capability for world class AI. For example, Lazarus AI also has products to classify, extract, and summarise any document of any size in any language with zero training, including extracting structure from handwritten input, with incredibly high accuracy rates.
Lazarus AI currently has customers in the healthcare, banking and insurance industries.
Why we invested
Lazarus AI is pioneering the integration of advanced reasoning across diverse information types. It delivers a proven technical ability to create specialised foundation models for planning, analysis, and cognitive reasoning.
Importantly, Lazarus AI has been designed with human agency at its core. It investigates and executes an intelligence-led activity, explains its decisions, and cites sources at each step. This approach is essential if it were to support an underwriter or a claims analyst.
Our vision is to use this technology to better enable underwriters and claims officers to get near-instantaneous research and evidence-based reports, highlighting areas of risk or claims which may inform a change in position. The intel is derived and validated from multiple sources (e.g. topographical maps, socio-economic, past image and claim repositories). These insights aid analysis with respect to adjusting risk appetite, portfolio strategy and complexity estimates for reserving positions. Tightly integrated into workflow, AI supports insurance employees to be responsive, adaptive and fast paced.
Looking ahead
Investing in companies like Lazarus AI represents not only a strategic move, but a transformative opportunity. By participating in the growth of AI in insurance, QBE is positioning itself to learn and harness the unprecedented potential of these innovations.
“We are energized to partner with QBE, one of the most innovative and creative global insurers in the industry. And most of all, looking forward to the opportunities we all have ahead of us in solving hard challenges that ultimately affect people’s lives.“ Ariel Elizarov, CEO and Co-founder Lazarus AI
QBE Ventures is excited about the opportunity for QBE to partner with Lazarus AI as it brings its emerging multi-modal, AI decisioning capability into the global insurance market.
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