Each year there are millions of auto accidents around the world, and the disaster and recovery process is essential to help people get back on their feet. A major issue is that the process relies heavily on human appraisers, who have varying levels of expertise and inconsistent availability to assess damage in a timely manner. Tractable is the AI-powered solution that is replacing human appraisers. Tractable’s proprietary platform has been trained on millions of images and it can capture and process images of the damage to predict repair costs far faster than any human can.
London TechWatch sat down with Tractable Cofounder and President Adrien Cohen to learn more about Tractable’s operations and recent funding round, which will allow it to expand into new markets such as Southeast Asia and Latin America. Tractable has raised a total of $59.9M across four rounds.
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
Georgian Partners led the $25M Series C round, and our existing investors Ignition Partners and Insight Partners also participated.
Tell us about the product or service Tractable offers
Tractable helps the world recover faster from accidents and disasters.
Hundreds of millions of people are affected by accidents and disasters every year, with the financial impact worldwide exceeding $1 trillion.
To help them recover, an efficient accident and disaster recovery process is critical – which is where insurers come in. Every recovery starts with a visual appraisal: an expert inspects the damage, estimates the cost of fixing it, and unlocks the funds to begin the rebuild.
However, this process is inefficient. Dispatching an appraiser is dependent on availability and can take days, or even weeks. Equally, inspections and estimations rely on humans with different opinions and levels of expertise. This creates varying results, which in turn cause uncertainties and delays, impeding the recovery process.
By applying AI to accident and disaster recovery, Tractable resolves these problems. Our AI solutions capture and process photos of the damage and predict repair costs, meaning insurers receive damage assessments in a fraction of the time – accelerating their decision making and helping them provide a more effective service to their customers.
What inspired the start of Tractable?
Tractable was inspired by the prospect of being able to take computer vision technology from the lab and apply it to complex problems facing the real world. What AI can do, which humans can’t, is to run thousands of visual photo checks across different construction events, all in real-time, so that bad setups can be detected and prevented, without slowing down workers.
We quickly focused on the auto industry, which is our main target at the present time. Our AI understands auto damage like a human appraiser, and it’s being applied to real accidents all over the world to accelerate the claims process and get people back in their cars more quickly. It’s the perfect AI task: heavy on image classification, where AI can surpass human performance.
How is Tractable different?
Because it’s been trained on many millions of images, our AI is like an auto repairer who has repaired millions of collisions and consistently repairs to standard each time. It can also do tasks that humans can’t. For example, the AI can make a prediction on the basis of damage that isn’t obvious or visible to a human but can be picked up by computer vision in the image. It can also understand the damage to cars that it isn’t familiar with, such as newer models that it hasn’t seen before.
What market you are targeting and how big is it?
With accidents and disasters, cars get damaged most often, and parts are easy to replace. The £385B global ecosystem for auto claims – involving repairers, part sellers, paint sellers, towing companies, auto recyclers, and car hire companies – contains many inefficiencies that AI can help with.
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What’s your business model?
We charge the companies we work with, based on the volume of claims we process with them. We have traction with some of the biggest insurers in the world, and the plan is to scale our work with them into new areas and use cases, ultimately becoming the main provider of AI imaging solutions to the global insurance industry.
Who do you consider to be your primary competitors?
Within our first vertical of auto claims, there are many companies looking to get into the market, from software incumbents to start-ups to tech giants. While all these companies talk about automating auto appraisals with visual AI, we believe we are the only ones to be creating end-to-end estimates with AI in live claims production with leading insurers. In addition, we believe we are the only ones to let people test our AI with live unseen cases at open events such as webinars and conferences.
What was the funding process like?
Very competitive – there was a large amount of interest from international VCs, but we chose Georgian as we thought they would add the most value. In addition, our existing investors, Ignition and Insight Partners, also contributed to the round.
What stood out most to us was their Impact team, a team of approximately 15 world-class AI researchers and engineers from places such as Facebook AI Research and Amazon Alexa, focused on R&D collaborations with their portfolio companies. Georgian has a strong track record of using its technical expertise to further help applied AI companies become dominant international players.
We’d never seen such a strong technical team at a VC aimed solely at developing IP for and with portfolio companies. Given Tractable’s success in the market has been driven by R&D superiority, this was a major selling point to us.
What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital?
The challenge is always to keep building the business while managing the financing process. That said, this process went very quickly, as what we are doing and our commercial traction is unique, so we had a number of investors leaning in. So while the process was intense, ultimately it hasn’t been too much of a distraction from the day job of continuing to build the company and scale our solution.
What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?
Of course, you should ask them! But we are a unique deep-tech AI business with commercial traction and viability, and battle-tested deployment in multiple markets. We are uniquely positioned in that we have both the tech and the data, and we are learning every time we receive a claim, which means our AI can sustain its lead over competitors. Our technology has attracted substantial interest from insurers across the world, and we are active with multiple insurers across nine countries.
We are uniquely positioned in that we have both the tech and the data, and we are learning every time we receive a claim, which means our AI can sustain its lead over competitors.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
The investment will accelerate Tractable’s expansion into new markets. We want to cement our position as the emerging global leader in applying AI to accidents and disaster recovery. So you should see us enter new markets that we haven’t operated in to date, such as Southeast Asia, Latin America, and large countries in Europe where we are not yet present.
What advice can you offer companies in London that do not have a fresh injection of capital in the bank?
Ask yourself what type of money you need. VC money is not necessarily the best option for every company, but it works for a certain type, with a specific growth profile.
Focus on the product and customer needs. Financing is just a means to an end, and if what you produce meshes with what customers want, it will follow in due course.
Where do you see the company going now over the near term?
Continuing to build our position as the global market leader in this space, and hiring the staff to cement that – both in R&D and in the people who deploy our tech with the customer. And entering new markets, and working with new clients, and even new use cases – there’s a lot of areas of the auto claims ecosystem where our technology can add value.
What is your favorite restaurant in London?
Santo Mare in Marylebone: their tiramisu is insane, they prepare it in front of you.
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