We’re not sure exactly how their Friday night dinners went, but one of them must have just got up and said “Wow, that can be a start-up!” Turns out, they actually meant it and followed through on their idea. The Israeli start-up DigitalOwl, founded by two brothers, announced yesterday (Wednesday) the completion of a $ 20 million round of funding led by Insight Partners, with participation from Ibex Investors and Fusion. This current funding round comes a year after their initial seed-funding recruitment, in which Amnon Shashua, the founder of Mobileye, also participated. The company has raised a total of $29 million thus far.
On Friday they thought of the idea- on Monday, they founded the start-up
DigitalOwl's platform can automatically summarize and analyze medical documents for insurance and legal companies to help them better combat fraud, underwrite new plans, execute claims, and build strong legal cases. They do so by using natural language processing technologies. According to the company, about 80% of the insurance companies' work time is invested in dissecting medical records in an exhausting manual process that then must be transferred to another medical auditor. With DigitalOwl, insurance companies can focus primarily on making more accurate and correct decisions, and at a much faster pace. In addition, DigitalOwl explains to us that the system is also capable of extracting twice as many critical medical findings for the decision-making process, compared to the manual work process.
DigitalOwl was founded in 2018 by brothers Yuval and Amit Man and employs 41 people in Israel and the United States. Yuval Man, a lawyer by profession, is the company's CEO while Amit Man, the CTO, specializes in artificial intelligence. According to them, the idea for the start-up came up during a routine family Friday meal: "We talked about how our weeks went, I told them about what I do in my job as a tort lawyer, which includes a lot of going over medical documents to assess medical damage," says Yuval Mann. "Amit replied that it was crazy that this kind of work was still done manually and not based on artificial intelligence." I, of course, immediately rejected the idea and said it must be done by a human being because professionalism, judgment and professional expertise are required. But that Sunday at work, while I was going through medical documents, I realized he was right. The next day we started the company. "
In a conversation with Geektime, he says that this past year DigitalOwl has been able to understand the medical narrative: "The ability to understand not only what the medical findings are but also their connection to the medical history and story as a whole is necessary. What is the reason for the visit? What tests did the doctor perform during the visit? What is the medical diagnosis? What is the treatment plan?” According to him, understanding such underlying details makes it possible to not only understand the points of information but to tell the whole story clearly. In addition, the company is currently developing a risk forecasting engine to predict the period of incapacity of patients in work disability claims for life insurance.