Bastian, you are co-founder of the startup ambeRoad - what problem in the insurance industry did you solve?
With ambeRoad we solve a problem that probably every employee knows. We help employees in the insurance industry to find the right information regardless of data silos and file formats. Insurance companies often have their knowledge stored in a very decentralized way in unstructured formats. With the help of our intelligent enterprise search engine amberSearch we help employees to find the relevant information. Originally, we focused only on text documents. Over time, however, we realized that there is much more unstructured data than just text documents. Therefore, we now search not only text documents, but also multimedia content such as images, videos, audio files or collaboration tools. According to our customers, we can save up to one hour of search time per employee per week, depending on the use case.
Our goal is to give the user a user experience like the one he usually gets from internet search engines. Therefore, our user interface is strongly oriented towards that of Internet search providers. With the help of various AI-based technologies, we then also manage to offer a quality similar to that of Internet search.
What different use cases do you have for amberSearch?
There are several. InsurLab Germany and InsurTechHub Munich have helped us greatly through their network to develop numerous use cases and in some cases already put them into practice. For example, employees of industrial insurers can use amberSearch to find relevant clauses in contracts that are often decades old. Here, of course, the main focus is on topics that cannot really be mapped automatically, i.e. the more difficult special cases.
Another use case is finding reference judgments/cases in archives. Nowadays, legal insurance companies receive the court rulings of cases relevant to them in analog form. These are then scanned and stored in an archive, where often no one actually has an overview of which judgments they have. This is exactly where amberSearch helps to find the relevant reference judgment for the respective case.
Another use case where multimedia search comes into its own is the optimization of intranet searches. The intranet contains guidelines, general information, but also often explanatory videos, best practices and much more valuable information that we make child's play for our users to access.
And finally, of course, there is the option of a global search, i.e. we offer the employee a central point to search the entire internal company knowledge. This means that they can access all internal company information from a central point - regardless of whether it is on network drives, In Teams, SharePoint, or as an attachment to an e-mail in their mailbox. Of course, the whole thing always takes access rights into account, but it also works in different languages.
How exactly would you describe your career - how did it all start and where are you now?
Compared to many other startups, we probably have a relatively wild history. ambeRoad originally started out selling backpacks through Amazon. Over time, however, we have evolved into a pure tech startup and we no longer have anything to do with Amazon. Then, in late summer, we closed our pre-seed investment round. In the meantime, we have conducted several pilot projects and are converting them into long-term partnerships.
We use the capital to further advance product development and to expand our sales team. Currently, we have already published a few success stories with e.g. RAG or Müller Maschinentechnik, some of our first customers. Currently, we are working on publishing more InsurTech-specific success stories - you will hear from us soon.
How does InsurLab Germany support you - what does your collaboration look like in concrete terms?
Being part of InsurLab Germany gives us many advantages as a start-up. Not only does such a network give us access to important events within the insurance industry, it also gives us the opportunity to pitch our product to relevant decision-makers and thus receive feedback. This then gives us the chance to develop business partnerships as well. In addition, there is the opportunity to present yourself to investors or simply use the reach of InsurLab to get your idea out into the world. Therefore, I can only recommend every founder who is in the InsurTech sector to become a member of InsurLab and share their own know-how and use that of others. That simply accelerates many things enormously.